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Price: 50p. (including postage)
LIONS LOVE
DAYS AND NIGHTS IN THE FOREST
SECTION 1
This companion to Section 2 -f 3 (already pub¬
lished) replaces the black Main Catalogue which is
now obsolete. Fully illustrated, it also contains all
the latest additions to the library as well as the
CINECENTA, COMPTON and ORB films recently
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SECTION 2 + 3
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with the
NATIONAL FILM THEATRE
presents a
THIRD
WORLD
FILM
FESTIVAL
Starting April 10,
the first major retrospective to
be held outside Latin America
The films will be in distribution
through The Other Cinema
THIIU) WORM) CINEMA
FILMS SHOWN WILL
INCLUDE:
THE HOUR OF THE
FURNACES
(Argentina)
Parts 1,2 8-3
Octavio Getino,
Fernando Solanas
BLOOD OF THE CONDOR
(Bolivia)
Jorge Sanjines
MEXICO, THE FROZEN
REVOLUTION
(Argentina)
Raymundo Gleyzer
THE ROAD TOWARDS THE
DEATH OF OLD REALES
(Argentina)
Gerardo Vallejo
TERRA EM TRANSE
(Brazil)
Glauber Rocha
THE GUNS/OS FUZIS
(Brazil)
Ruy Guerra
BARREN LIVES/VIDAS SECAS
(Brazil)
Nelson Pereira Dos Santos
THE JACKAL/EL CHACAL
(Chile)
Miguel Littin
For full list and times, contact
The Other Cinema or the NFT.
Programme details will appear
in the usual film guides.
April 10-16 National Film Theatre, South Bank, Waterloo, London SE1 (tel: 01-928 3232/3)
April 12-26 Collegiate Theatre, 15 Gordon St., Euston Road, London WC1 (tel: 01-734 8508/9)
Season tickets (for Collegiate only) available from The Other Cinema .
Third World Programme Booklet from the NFT and The Other Cinema .
Distribution inquiries and free catalogue:
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l
LITTLE BIG MAN
DLISTIN HOFFMAN
“4 HIP EPIC!”
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Cinema study
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New York University
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From September 1971 to August 1972 the
Department of Cinema Studies at New York
University’s School of the Arts will screen,
discuss, and analyze 350 feature films and
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li
Being the adventures of a young man whose principal
interests are rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven.
STANLEY KUBRICK t
A Stanley Kubrick Production "A CLOCKWORK 0RAN6E" Starring Malcolm McDowell • Patrick Magee • Adrienne Corri
and Miriam Karlin • Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick • Based on the novel by Anthony Burgess • Produced and
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iii
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UNIVERSITY
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FILMS FOR HISTORIANS
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The
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From Nanook to Woodstock
by Lewis Jacobs
This book is the first attempt to survey the develop¬
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FILMS FROM
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THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC
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Jean Renoir’s
LA GRANDE ILLUSION
released through the British Film Institute
Sergei Eisenstein’s
THE GENERAL LINE
released through the British Film Institute
*****
Ernie Pintoff’s
DYNAMITE CHICKEN
Dennis Hopper in
THE AMERICAN DREAMER
Albert Knobler’s
HAPPINESS IN TWENTY YEARS
*****
A. J. P. Taylor in
PEACEMAKING 1919
R. Buckminster Fuller in
THE WORLD GAME
Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison in
WORLDS OF TOMORROW
—and many more to come!
IV
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V
THE LONDON FILM SCHOOL
QUALIFICATIONS
Scholarships or grants previously awarded by any educational
authority, government or Foundation do not necessarily
guarantee acceptance by the school. Students must be able to
understand and communicate in English at an advanced level.
Students must be prepared to work hard in an environment
that is more a workshop than an academy. A basic knowledge
of still photography is an essential—even for students who wish
to become writers or directors.
Although there is no official minimum age, no candidate is
enrolled immediately on completion of his secondary educa¬
tion. Candidates are invited to apply at this time for an
interview, in order that their potentialities may be assessed.
If considered suitable they will be given provisional acceptance
for a later course.
Candidates who are already graduates of Universities or
colleges may be accepted without this requirement.
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be taken into account. All fees must be paid in advance.
For Residents of the United Kingdom
Minimum educational requirements are a university degree,
five passes at ‘O’ Level and two at ‘A’ Level G.C.E., or
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asked to submit work and must in all cases attend for at least
one interview at this school; they may also be interviewed by
their local education authorities.
CURRICULUM
In addition to lectures, practical sessions, seminars, etc., all
students must work on at least six films during the two years.
In the second term, each student is required to make a short
individual exercise in 16 mm. colour—working in groups of
four. All other exercises are group films made in units of from
5 to 9 students (depending on the nature of the term’s exercise).
At least two films must be in colour. At least two should be in
35 mm.
DATES
COURSE 60
COURSE 61
COURSE 62
COURSE 63
25th September, 1972
8th January, 1973
30th April, 1973
1st October, 1973
Note: A complete self-contained course commences three
times every year. Each term lasts twelve weeks. There are three
terms in each year.
Our intensive two year courses concentrate on the arts and techniques of professional film-making, but
our position in central London makes it possible for students to keep up with the other arts at first hand.
Narrow specialisation is discouraged: every student is expected to reach a reasonable standard in all
departments—and to pass tests in the practical use of cameras, etc. During the second year each student
should achieve fully professional results in any job allocated to him.
A THIRD YEAR COURSE in Animation is available to successful graduates of the two year Diploma Course. In certain cases,
when a student wishes to make a career in the field and shows the required talent, animation may be taken in lieu of the second year
of the Diploma Course. Graduates of certain other film schools may apply for the animation course.
All films, both live action and animation, are based on the students 9 own original work. Subjects and jobs are chosen democratically,
especially in the first year—but films must be made within required budgets. Advice is given by experienced film-makers and pro¬
duction is supervised by professional course directors, recently including Les Blair, Charles Crichton, James Clark, Sidney Cole,
Desmond Davis, Clive Donner, John Fletcher, Guy Hamilton, Geoff Husson, John Krish, Wolf Rilla, Michael Truman and Mannie Wynn.
The London Film School is an educational charity registered with the Department of Education and Science. Board of Governors:
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24 SHELTON STREET, LONDON, W.C.2 Telephone: 01-240 0168
vi
Germany: The Missing Years
Rediscovery of a major entertainment cinema
During April and May NFT 1 and 2 will present several programmes of
outstanding interest. Rare films from the East German Archive cover the period
in Germany during the 1930s and present a view of an entertainment
Programmes 1 April-26 May 1972 industry virtually unknown in Britain. A second season. Third World Film
Festival (Pt.1, Latin America), comprises 14 programmes devoted to South
American political cinema, including the work of Fernando Solanas, Jorge
Sanjines, Miguel Littin and Glauber Rocha. Other events include the first
British retrospective of the films of Frangois Truffaut, further recently acquired
material from the National Film Archive and a season of movies by blacklisted
writers and the Hollywood Ten. In addition three of the John Player
guests—Garson Kanin, Edward Dmytryk and Alan Pakula—will make
appearances in relation to seasons of their work.
La Jana in Stern von Rio (director Karl Anton)
National Film Theatre
South Bank, Arts Centre, London
Box Office: 01-928 3232/3
Membership of both theatres at the
South Bank is only £2 for Associates,
who can bring three guests, or £3
for Full Membership to include a
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Further information from
the Membership Office
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Telephone 01 -437 4355
or simply call in at the NFT
between 11.30 am and 8.30 pm
Telephone 01-928 3232/3
viii
Editor: Penelope Houston
Associate: David Wilson
Designer: John Harmer
Business Manager: John Smoker
Spring 1972
Volume 41 No. 2
Articles Interview with Stanley Kubrick Philip Strick, Penelope Houston 62
The Citizen Kane Book George Coulouris and
Bernard Herrmann, with Ted Gilling 71
Countries of the Mind Tom Milne 74
The Director as Superstar Joseph McBride 78
The Film Industry and the EEC Neville Hunnings 82
Not a Garbo or a Gilbert in the Bunch: an interview
with Alan Pakula Tom Milne 88
Red Membranes, Red Banners James Paul Gay 94
Anti-Cinema: Rainer Werner Fassbinder David Wilson 99
Pictures of Innocence John Lindsay Brown 101
Graham Greene as Film Critic Judy Adamson 104
Features In the Picture 67
Zoltan Huszarik’s Sindbad 86
Correspondence 116
Notes on Contributors 118
Film Guide 120
Film Reviews The Last Picture Show Jan Dawson 107
Macbeth Nigel Andrews 108
Punishment Park David Wilson 109
Modern Times David Robinson 109
The Decameron Philip Strick no
Kotch Richard Combs 111
The Boy Friend Jan Dawson in
Dirty Harry Tom Milne 1 12
Millhouse: a White Comedy Bernard Weiner 112
Book Reviews The New Documentary in Action Gavin Millar 114
Greed: a Film by Erich von Stroheim John Gillett 114
American Film Institute Catalogue Kevin Brownlow 115
Patterns of Realism Eric Rhode 116
On the cover: Timothy Bottoms and Maggie sight and sound is an independent critical magazine sponsored and published by the British
Smith in AlanJ. Pakula's ‘The Widower * Film Institute. It is not an organ for the expression of official British Film Institute policy: signed
articles represent the views of their authors.
Copyright © 1972 by The British Film Institute, editorial, publishing and advertising offices: British
Film Institute, 81 Dean Street, London, W 1 V 6AA. 01-437 4355. Telex: 27624. Entered as 2nd class matter at
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6l
Philip Strick and Penelope Houston
We met Kubrick last November at his home near Borehamwood, a casual
labyrinth of studios, offices, and seemingly dual-purpose rooms in which family
life and film-making overlap as though the one were unthinkable without the
other. Despite his reputed aversion to the ordeals of interrogation, Kubrick
proved an immensely articulate conversationalist, willing to talk out in detail any
aspect, technical or theoretical, of his devotion to the cinema. When we came to
transcribe our tapes, what indeed emerged was perhaps rather more of a conver¬
sation, covering a lot of ground, than a formal interview.
When A Clockwork Orange opened in London a few weeks later, Kubrick
found himself in the front line of somebody else’s war. The critics were up in
arms about Straw Dogs , in particular, and A Clockwork Orange became caught
in the crossfire, especially after the Home Secretary’s much publicised visit to
the film. It was an extraordinary fuss (the novel was, after all, first published
ten years ago), the more so for seeming to be about a Clockwork Orange that
62
sounded like nothing much to do with the
film Kubrick made. But it also meant
that some of his replies to our original
questions would have to be revised, to
make due allowance for the arguments the
film had caused. So what follows is to some
extent a Kubrick rewrite of a Kubrick
interview—in the interests, as always with
Kubrick, of precision.
How closely did you work with Anthony
Burgess in adapting A Clockwork Orange
for the screen?
STANLEY KUBRICK : I had virtually no oppor¬
tunity of discussing the novel with Anthony
Burgess. He phoned me one evening when
he was passing through London and we had
a brief conversation on the telephone. It was
mostly an exchange of pleasantries. On the
other hand, I wasn’t particularly concerned
about this because in a book as brilliantly
written as A Clockwork Orange one would
have to be lazy not to be able to find the
answers to any questions which might arise
within the text of the novel itself. I think it
is reasonable to say that, whatever Burgess
had to say about the story was said in the
book.
How about your own contributions to the
story? You seem to have preserved the style
and structure of the original far more
closely than with most of your previous
films, and the dialogues are often exactly
the same as in the novel.
My contribution to the story consisted of
writing the screenplay. This was principally
a matter of selection and editing, though I
did invent a few useful narrative ideas and
reshape some of the scenes. However, in
general, these contributions merely clarified
what was already in the novel—such as the
Cat Lady telephoning the police, which
explains why the police appear at the end of
that scene. In the novel, it occurs to Alex
that she may have called them, but this is
the sort of thing that you can do in a novel
and not in the screenplay. I was also rather
pleased with the idea of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’
as a means of Alexander identifying Alex
again towards the end of the film.
How did you come to use ‘Singin* in the
Rain’ in the first place?
This was one of the more important ideas
which arose during rehearsal. This scene, in
fact, was rehearsed longer than any other
scene in the film and appeared to be going
nowhere. We spent three days trying to work
out just what was going to happen and
somehow it all seemed a bit inadequate.
Then suddenly the idea popped into my
head—I don’t know where it came from or
what triggered it off.
The main addition you seem to have
made to the original story is the scene of
Alex’s introduction to the prison. Why did
you feel this was important?
It may be the longest scene but I would
not think it is the most important. It was a
necessary addition because the prison
sequence is compressed, in comparison with
the novel, and one had to have something in
it which gave sufficient weight to the idea
that Alex was actually imprisoned. The
routine of checking into prison which, in
fact, is quite accurately presented in the film,
seemed to provide this necessary weight.
In the book there is another killing by
Alex while he is in prison. By omitting this,
don’t you run the risk of seeming to share
Alex’s own opinion of himself as a high-
spirited innocent?
I shouldn’t think so, and Alex doesn’t see
himself as a high-spirited innocent. He is
totally aware of his own evil and accepts it
with complete openness.
Alex seems a far pleasanter person in the
film than in the book . •.
Alex makes no attempt to deceive himself
or the audience as to his total corruption and
wickedness. He is the very personification of
evil. On the other hand, he has winning
qualities: his total candour, his wit, his
intelligence and his energy; these are
attractive qualities and ones, I might add,
which he shares with Richard III.
The violence done to Alex in the brain¬
washing sequence is in fact more horrifying
than anything he does himself. . .
It was absolutely necessary to give weight
to Alex’s brutality, otherwise I think there
would be moral confusion with respect to
what the government does to him. If he
were a lesser villain, then one could say:
‘Oh, yes, of course, he should not be given
this psychological conditioning; it’s all too
horrible and he really wasn’t that bad after
all.’ On the other hand, when you have
shown him committing such atrocious acts,
and you still realise the immense evil on the
part of the government in turning him into
something less than human in order to make
him good, then I think the essential moral
idea of the book is clear. It is necessary for
man to have choice to be good or evil, even
if he chooses evil. To deprive him of this
choice is to make him something less than
human—a clockwork orange.
But aren’t you inviting a sort of identi¬
fication with Alex?
I think, in addition to the personal
qualities I mentioned, there is the basic
psychological, unconscious identification
with Alex. If you look at the story not on the
social and moral level, but on the psycho¬
logical dream content level, you can regard
Alex as a creature of the id. He is within all
of us. In most cases, this recognition seems
to bring a kind of empathy from the
audience, but it makes some people very
angry and uncomfortable. They are unable
to accept this view of themselves and,
therefore, they become angry at the film.
It’s a bit like the King who kills the
messenger who brings him bad news and
rewards the one who brings him good news.
The comparison with Richard III makes
a striking defence against accusations that
the film encourages violence, delinquency
and so on. But as Richard is a safely distant
historical figure, does it meet them
completely?
There is no positive evidence that violence
in films or television causes social violence.
To focus one’s interest on this aspect of
violence is to ignore the principal causes,
which I would list as:
1. Original sin: the religious view.
2. Unjust economic exploitation: the
Marxist view.
3. Emotional and psychological frustra¬
tion: the psychological view.
4. Genetic factors based on the ‘Y*
chromosome theory: the biological
view.
5. Man—the killer ape: the evolutionary
view.
To try to fasten any responsibility on art as
the cause of life seems to me to have the case
put the wrong way around. Art consists of
reshaping life but it does not create life, or
cause life. Furthermore to attribute powerful
suggestive qualities to a film is at odds with
the scientifically accepted view that, even
after deep hypnosis, in a post-hypnotic state,
people cannot be made to do things which
are at odds with their natures.
Is there any kind of violence in films
which you might regard as socially
dangerous?
Well, I don’t accept that there is a
connection, but let us hypothetically say that
there might be one. If there were one, I
should say that the kind of violence that
might cause some impulse to emulate it is
the ‘fun’ kind of violence: the kind of
violence we see in the Bond films, or the
Tom and Jerry cartoons. Unrealistic vio¬
lence, sanitised violence, violence presented
as a joke. This is the only kind of violence
that could conceivably cause anyone to wish
to copy it, but I am quite convinced that not
even this has any effect.
There may even be an argument in
support of saying that any kind of violence
in films, in fact, serves a useful social
purpose by allowing people a means of
vicariously freeing themselves from the pent
up, aggressive emotions which are better
expressed in dreams, or in the dreamlike
state of watching a film, than in any form of
reality or sublimation.
Isn’t the assumption of your audience in
the case of Clockwork Orange likely to be
that you support Alex’s point of view and
in some way assume responsibility for it?
I don’t think that any work of art has a
responsibility to be anything but a work of
art. There obviously is a considerable
controversy, just as there always has been,
about what is a work of art, and I should be
the last to try to define that. I was amused
by Cocteau’s Orphie when the poet is given
the advice: ‘Astonish me’. The Johnsonian
definition of a work of art is also meaningful
to me, and that is that a work of art must
either make life more enjoyable or more
endurable. Another quality, which I think
forms part of the definition, is that a work of
art is always exhilarating and never depres¬
sing, whatever its subject matter may be.
In view of the particular exhilaration of
Alex’s religious fantasies, has the film run
into trouble with clerical critics?
The reaction of the religious press has
been mixed, although a number of superb
reviews have been written. One of the most
perceptive reviews by the religious press, or
any other press, appeared in the Catholic
News written by John E. Fitzgerald, and I
would like to quote one portion of it:
‘In print we’ve been told (in B. F.
Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity) that
man is but a grab-bag of conditioned
reflexes. On screen with images rather than
words, Stanley Kubrick shows that man is
more than a mere product of heredity and/or
environment. For as Alex’s clergyman
friend (a character who starts out as a fire-
and-brimstone-spouting buffoon but ends
up the spokesman for the film’s thesis) says:
“When a man cannot choose, he ceases to
be a man”.
‘The film seems to say that to take away
a man’s choice is not to redeem but merely
restrain him: otherwise we have a society of
oranges, organic but operating like clock¬
work. Such brainwashing, organic and
psychological, is a weapon that totalitarians
in state, church or society might wish for an
easier good even at the cost of individual
63
Alex (.Malcolm McDowell) in the Chelsea Drugstore sequence , shot zvith a 9.8 mm wide angle lens.
rights and dignity. Redemption is a compli¬
cated thing and change must be motivated
from within rather than imposed from
without if moral values are to be upheld.
But Kubrick is an artist rather than a
moralist and he leaves it to us to figure
what’s wrong and why, what should be done
and how it should be accomplished.*
Your choice of lenses for the shooting of the
film often gives it a subtly distorted visual
quality. Why did you want that particular
look?
It may sound like an extremely obvious
thing to say, but I think it is worth saying
nevertheless that when you are making a
film, in addition to any higher purpose you
may have in mind, you must be interesting;
visually interesting, narratively interesting,
interesting from an acting point of view.
All ideas for creating interest must be held
up against the yardstick of the theme of the
story, the narrative requirements and the
purpose of the scene; but, within that, you
must make a work of art interesting. I recall
a comment recorded in a book called
Stanislavski Directs , in which Stanislavski
told an actor that he had the right under¬
standing of the character, the right under¬
standing of the text of the play, that what he
was doing was completely believable, but
that it was still no good because it wasn’t
interesting.
Were you looking after the hand-held
camera for the fight with the Cat Lady?
Yes, all of the hand-held camerawork is
mine. In addition to the fun of doing the
shooting myself, I find it is virtually im¬
possible to explain what you want in a
hand-held shot to even the most talented
and sensitive camera operator.
To what extent do you rationalise a shot
before setting it up?
There are certain aspects of a film which
can meaningfully be talked about, but
photography and editing do not lend them¬
selves to verbal analysis. It’s very much the
same as the problem one has talking about
painting, or music. The questions of taste
involved and the decision-making criteria
are essentially non-verbal, and whatever you
say about them tends to read like the back of
a record album. These are decisions that have
to be made every few minutes during the
shooting, and they are just down to the
director’s taste and imagination.
How did you come to choose the Purcell
piece—the ‘Music for the Funeral of Queen
Mary’?
Well, this answer is going to sound a lot
like the last one. You’re in an area where
words are not particularly relevant. In
thinking about the music for the scene, the
Purcell piece occurred to me and, after I
listened to it several times in conjunction
with the film, there was simply no question
about using it.
The arrangements by Walter Carlos are
extraordinarily effective ...
I think that Walter Carlos has done some¬
thing completely unique in the field of
electronic realisation of music—that’s the
phrase that they use. I think that I’ve heard
most of the electronic and ntusique concrete
LPs there are for sale in Britain, Germany,
France, Italy and the United States; not
because I particularly like this kind of music,
but out of my researches for 2001 and
Clockwork Orange. I think Walter Carlos is
the only electronic composer and realiser
who has managed to create a sound which is
not an attempt at copying the instruments of
the orchestra and yet which, at the same
time, achieves a beauty of its own employing
electronic tonalities. I think that his version
of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony rivals hearing a full
orchestra playing it, and that is saying an
awful lot.
There is very little post-synchronisation
for the dialogue . . .
There is no post-synchronisation. I’m
quite pleased about this because every scene
was shot on location; even the so-called sets
that we built which were, in fact, built in a
factory about 40 feet off the noisy High Street
in Borehamwood, a few hundred yards from
the old M-G-M Studio. Despite this, we
were able to get quite acceptably clean
soundtracks.
With the modern equipment that’s
available today in the form of microphones,
radio transmitters and so forth, it should be
possible to get a usable soundtrack almost
anywhere. In the scene where the tramp
recognises Alex who is standing looking at
the Thames, next to the Albert Bridge, there
was so much traffic noise on the location that
you had to shout in order to be heard, but
we were able to get such a quiet soundtrack
that it was necessary to add street noise in
the final mix to make it realistic. We used a
microphone the size of a paper clip, and it
was secured with black tape on the tramp’s
scarf. In several shots you can see the
microphone, but you don’t know what you
are looking at.
In concentrating on the action of the film,
as you do, isn’t there a danger that the
lesser characters may appear rather one¬
dimensional?
The danger of everything that you do in
a film is that it may not work, it may be
boring, or bland, or stupid . . .
When you think of the greatest moments
of film, I think you are almost always
involved with images rather than scenes, and
certainly never dialogue. The thing a film
does best is to use pictures with music and
I think these are the moments you remember.
Another thing is the way an actor did some¬
thing: the way Emil Jannings took out his
handkerchief and blew his nose in The Blue
Angel , or those marvellous slow turns that
Nikolai Cherkassov did in Ivan the Terrible.
How did you manage the subjective shot
of Alex’s suicide attempt?
We bought an old Newman Sinclair
clockwork mechanism camera (no pun
intended) for £50. It’s a beautiful camera
In slow motion , Alex hurls his rebellious droogs into the river. Filmed at Thamesmead.
64
and it’s built like a battleship. We made a
number of polystyrene boxes which gave
about 18 inches of protection around the
camera, and cut out a slice for the lens. We
then threw the camera off a roof. In order to
get it to land lens first, we had to do this six
times and the camera survived all six drops.
On the final one, it landed right on the lens
and smashed it but it didn’t do a bit of harm
to the camera. This, despite the fact that the
polystyrene was literally blasted away from
it each time by the impact. The next day we
shot a steady test on the camera and found
there wasn’t a thing wrong with it. On this
basis, I would say that the Newman Sinclair
must be the most indestructible camera ever
made.
How much planning do you do before you
start to shoot a scene?
As much as there are hours in the day,
and days in the weeks. I think about a film
almost continuously. I try to visualise it and
arrive on the location, the crew is standing
around eating buns and drinking tea,
waiting to be told what to do. You’ve got to
keep them outside the room you’re rehear¬
sing in and take whatever time is necessary
to get everything right, and have it make
sense. There’s no way to define what this
process consists of. It obviously has to do
with taste and imagination and it is in this
crucial period of time that a film is really
created. Once you know you’ve got some¬
thing worthwhile, the shooting becomes a
matter of recording (improving if you can)
what you have already done in rehearsal.
Whatever problems exist during the actual
shooting are not the kind of problems that
worry me. If the actor isn’t getting it right,
well, he’ll get it right eventually. If the
camera operator spoils a shot, it can be done
again. The thing that can never be changed,
and the thing that is the make or break of a
picture, are those few hours you spend alone
The Minister of the Interior {Anthony Sharp ) visits the prison.
I try to work out every conceivable variation
of ideas which might exist with respect to
the various scenes, but I have found that
when you finally come down to the day the
scene is going to be shot and you arrive on
the location with the actors, having had the
experience of already seeing some scenes
shot, somehow it’s always different. You find
out that you have not really explored the
scene to its fullest extent. You may have been
thinking about it incorrectly, or you may
simply not have discovered one of the
variations which now in context with every¬
thing else that you have shot is simply better
than anything you had previously thought of.
The reality of the final moment, just before
shooting, is so powerful that all previous
analysis must yield before the impressions
you receive under these circumstances, and
unless you use this feedback to your positive
advantage, unless you adjust to it, adapt to
it and accept the sometimes terrifying
weaknesses it can expose, you can never
realise the most out of your film.
How do you usually work when you get
to the reality of the final moment?
Whenever I start a new scene, the most
important thing in my mind is, within the
needs of the theme and the scene, to make
something happen worth putting on film.
The most crucial part of this comes when
you start rehearsals on a new scene. You
in the actual place with the actors, with the
crew outside drinking their tea.
Sometimes you find that the scene is
absolutely no good at all. It doesn’t make
sense when you see it acted. It doesn’t
provide the necessary emotional or factual
information in an interesting way, or in a
way which has the right weight to it. Any
number of things can suddenly put you in a
position where you’ve got nothing to shoot.
The only thing you can say about a moment
like this is that it’s better to realise it while
you still have a chance to change it and to
create something new, than it is to record for
ever something that is wrong. This is the
best and the worst time: it is the time you
have your most imaginative ideas, things
that have not occurred to you before,
regardless of how much you’ve thought
about the scene. It’s also the time when you
can stand there and feel very dumb and
unhappy with what you’re seeing, and not
have the faintest idea of what to do about it.
Do you very consciously favour a
particular style of shooting?
If something is really happening on the
screen, it isn’t crucial how it’s shot. Chaplin
had such a simple cinematic style that it was
almost like I Love Lucy , but you were
always hypnotised by what was going on,
unaware of the essentially non-cinematic
style. He frequently used cheap sets, routine
lighting and so forth, but he made great
films. His films will probably last longer than
anyone else’s. You could say that Chaplin
was no style and all content. On the other
hand, the opposite can be seen in Eisenstein’s
films, who is all style and no content or,
depending on how generous you want to be,
little content. Many of Eisenstein’s films are
really quite silly; but they are so beautifully
made, so brilliantly cinematic, that, despite
their heavily propagandistic simpleminded¬
ness, they become important. Obviously, if
you can combine style and content, you have
the best of all possible films.
Do you have a preference for any one
aspect of the whole film-making process?
I think I enjoy editing the most. It’s the
nearest thing to some reasonable environ¬
ment in which to do creative work. Writing,
of course, is very satisfying, but, of course,
you’re not working with film. The actual
shooting of a film is probably the worst
circumstances you could try to imagine for
creating a work of art. There is, first of all,
the problem of getting up very early every
morning and going to bed very late every
night. Then there is the chaos, confusion
and frequently physical discomfort. It would
be, I suppose, like a writer trying to write a
book while working at a factory lathe in
temperatures which range from 95 to —10
degrees Fahrenheit. In addition to this, of
course, editing is the only aspect of the
cinematic art that is unique. It shares no
connection with any other art form: writing,
acting, photography, things that are major
aspects of the cinema, arc still not unique to
it, but editing is.
How long did the editing take on
Clockwork Orange ?
The editing up to the point of dubbing
took about six months, working seven days a
week.
Do you ever have problems cutting out
your own material?
When I’m editing, I’m only concerned
with the questions of ‘Is it good or bad ?’
‘Is it necessary ?’ ‘Can I get rid of it ?’ ‘Does
it work ?’ My identity changes to that of an
editor. I am never concerned with how much
difficulty there was to shoot something, how
much it cost and so forth. I look at the
material with completely different eyes. I’m
never troubled losing material. I cut every¬
thing to the bone. When you’re shooting,
you want to make sure that you don’t miss
anything and you cover it as fully as time
and budget allow. When you’re editing, you
want to get rid of everything that isn’t
essential.
How much support coverage do you
shoot?
There’s always a conflict between time,
money and quality. If you shoot a lot of
coverage, then you must either spend a lot
of money, or settle for less quality of
performance. I find that when I’m shooting
a scene where the acting is primarily
important, I shoot a lot of takes but I don’t
try to get a lot of coverage from other angles.
I try to shoot the scene as simply as possible
to get the maximum performance from the
actors without presenting them with the
problem of repeating the performance too
many times from different angles. On the
other hand, in an action scene, where it’s
relatively easy to shoot, you want lots and
lots of angles so that you can do something
interesting with it in the cutting room.
65
Alex's return home , to Mum, Dad and the lodger: Sheila Raynor , Clive Francis , Malcolm McDowell ,
PAi/ip Stone.
The last sequence: Alex in hospital , cottft f/ie Minister in attendance .
Do you direct actors in every detail, or do
you expect them to some extent to come up
with their own ideas?
I come up with the ideas. That is essen¬
tially the director’s job. There is a mis¬
conception, I think, about what directing
actors means: it generally goes along the
lines of the director imposing his will over
difficult actors, or teaching people who don’t
know how to act. I try to hire the best actors
in the world. The problem is comparable to
one a conductor might face. There’s little
joy in trying to get a magnificent perfor¬
mance from a student orchestra. It’s difficult
enough to get one with all the subtleties and
nuances you might want out of the greatest
orchestra in the world. You want to have
great virtuoso soloists, and so with actors.
Then it’s not necessary to teach them how
to act or to discipline them or to impose your
will upon them because there is usually no
problem along those lines. An actor will
almost always do what you want him to do
if he is able to do it; and, therefore, since
great actors are able to do almost anything,
you find you have few problems. You can
then concentrate on what you want them to
do, what is the psychology of the character,
what is the purpose of the scene, what is the
story about ? These are things that are often
muddled up and require simplicity and
exactitude. The director’s job is to provide
the actor with ideas, not to teach him how
to act or to trick him into acting. There’s no
way to give an actor what he hasn’t got in
the form of talent. You can give him ideas,
thoughts, attitudes. The actor’s job is to
create emotion. Obviously, the actor may
have some ideas too, but this is not what his
primary responsibility is. You can make a
mediocre actor less mediocre, you can make
a terrible actor mediocre, but you cannot go
very far without the magic. Great perfor¬
mances come from the magical talent of the
actor, plus the ideas of the director.
The other part of the director’s job is to
exercise taste: he must decide whether what
he is seeing is interesting, whether it’s
appropriate, whether it is of sufficient weight,
whether it’s credible. These are decisions
that no one else can make.
You made what might seem some
unusual casting choices for your last two
films—how do you find the actors you
want?
Well, that really comes down to a question
of taste, doesn’t it ? A lot of pictures are cast
by producers and their decisions are
frequently based on proven success rather
than unproven hints at talent. Many
producers aren’t willing to decide whether
an actor who is unknown and who has done
very little work is really good. I have nothing
against people of proven talent, but some¬
times there may be no one in that category
who is right for the part.
Do you enjoy working with different
actors? With a few exceptions—Peter
Sellers, for instance—you haven’t often
used the same actor twice, unlike a lot of
directors who obviously prefer to build up
a sort of stock company of people who
know their work.
I don’t really think in those terms. I try
to choose the best actors for the parts,
whether I know them or not. I would avoid
actors who have reputations for being
destructive and neurotic but, other than that,
there is no one whom I would not consider
using for a part. . .
66
The only thing that is really important in
your relationship with actors is that they
must know that you admire them, that you
admire their work, and there’s no way to
fake that. You must really admire them or
you shouldn’t use them. If they know that
you admire their work, which they can sense
in a thousand different ways, it doesn’t
really matter what you think of each other
or what you say to them, or whether you are
terribly friendly or not. The thing they care
about is their work. Some actors are very
amusing and pleasant and always cheerful.
They are, of course, more pleasant to have
around than those who are morose, vacant or
enigmatic. But how they behave when
you’re not shooting has very little to do with
what happens when the camera turns over.
You made Clockwork Orange initially
because you had to postpone your Napoleon
project. How do you see the Napoleon film
developing?
First of all, I start from the premise that
there has never been a great historical film,
and I say that with all apologies and respect
to those who have made historical films,
including myself. I don’t think anyone has
ever successfully solved the problem of
dealing in an interesting way with the
historical information that has to be con¬
veyed, and at the same time getting a sense
of reality about the daily life of the
characters. You have to get a feeling of what
it was like to be with Napoleon. At the same
time, you have to convey enough historical
information in an intelligent, interesting and
concise way so that the audience under¬
stands what happened.
Would you include Abel Gance’s
Napoleon in this verdict?
I think I would have to. I know that the
film is a masterpiece of cinematic invention
and it brought cinematic innovations to the
screen which are still being called innova¬
tions whenever someone is bold enough to
try them again. But on the other hand, as a
film about Napoleon, I have to say I’ve
always been disappointed in it.
Did you think of Clockwork Orange as
being in any way a form of relaxation
between two very big films?
I don’t think in terms of big movies, or
small movies. Each movie presents problems
of its own and has advantages of its own.
Each movie requires everything that you
have to give it, in order to overcome the
artistic and logistic problems that it poses.
There are advantages in an epic film, just as
there are disadvantages. It is much easier to
do a huge crowd scene and make it interesting
than it is to film a man sitting at a table
thinking. |
I
IN
THE
PICTURE
The Case of
Karoly Makk
The surprise and success of a good,
wise and accomplished film, Love ,
reminded Western critics that long
ago there was another director
called Karoly Makk, who made
one or two of the best Hungarian
films of the 1950s and then
apparently vanished. If the two
Makks were one and the same, they
concluded, he must by now be a
somewhat ancient man . . .
In fact he is one and the same,
and not at all ancient. An exact
contemporary of Jancsb, at 46
Makk is notably youthful, bouncy,
amiable and less inclined, he
congratulates himself (close col¬
leagues say he is mistaken) to the
impetuous temper of his younger
days. His film career stretches back
considerably further than his first
feature success, Liliomfi , made in
1954. Ten years earlier, at eighteen,
he was assistant on an experimental,
expressionist film, 2x2, which
starred a prominent fascist actor,
L 4 szl 6 Szillassy. After the Libera¬
tion he found himself working once
again on the same film, which had
come into the hands of the Peasant
Party. ‘We cut out all the bits with
Szillassy—though not where he
was in shadow or rear view—and
reshot the scenes with Zoltan
Varkonyi. The resulting picture
was a terrible flop.*
Whilst working on the first
version of 2 X 2 Makk came to
know such leftish film-makers as
Istv&n Szbts and L£szl6 R&nody;
and it was R 4 nody who recom¬
mended the energetic youngster to
the Peasant Party. Enrolling in the
Budapest Academy of Dramatic
and Film Art, he had as his
professor Geza Radvanyi. Along
with Felix Mariassy, Makk was an
assistant on Radvanyi’s most cele¬
brated film, the neo-realist Some¬
where in Europe , scripted by Bela
Balazs.
On graduation from the
Academy Makk, with Imre Feher,
was assigned to the newsreel
studios. When he quarrelled with
the manager, however, he was sent
off to work on a farm. After six
months’ ploughing, he had a stroke
of luck in summer 1950 when Felix
Mariassy, then shooting his second
film, was taken ill, but said he
could finish the picture with Makk
as assistant. After this assignment
Makk made a couple of shorts
(Cabal and Love; The Trained
Patient) and was co-director with
Zoltdn Fabri on Signs of Life and
with Zoltan Varkonyi on his best
picture, an adaptation of Tibor
Dery’s Metiyhert Simon.
At last in 1954, at the age of 28,
Makk made his first feature film,
Liliomfi , which was a significant
stage in the Hungarian cinema’s
progress out of the dogma of
Socialist Realism in having no
message except delight. Makk
attributes its success to a youthful
innocence of either discipline or
inhibition. After eighteen years
Kdroly Makk on the set of ' Love’
this mixture of Biedermeyer
operetta and commedia delV arte
seems only a little overlong. Makk’s
admirable comedy timing, his
witty take-off of operetta conven¬
tions and his gentle, observant
vision of human relationship have
survived intact.
With the impetus of Liliomfi ,
Makk went on to make two films in
quick succession. Ward No. 9 was
intended to expose errors of the
Stalinist period through specific
criticism of hospital services. Per¬
haps it was a style to which
Hungarian film-makers were still
unused; people who have seen it
recently say that it has crumbled
somewhat, while Makk himself
feels that the intentions exceeded
the execution, and likes only
isolated scenes in a once praised
film. In Tale of the Twelve Points he
again indulged his deft talent for
comedy with a story of a group of
people led astray by optimistic
expectations of a football pools win.
After 1956 (‘a disastrous trauma
in the life of our country. . . As
long as my generation makes films,
*56 will appear in some way or
another’), he began work on the
film that remains, with Love , his
best. The House Under the Rocks.
Imre Feher had taken the story to
Andras Kov£cs, then head of the
scenario department; but Kov6cs
decided it was more suitable for
Makk. Makk responded to it
eagerly: his favourite subjects have
always been those involving only
two or three people caught up in
some insoluble situation where
there are no villains and where each
character is in the right. ‘I like
situations in which details are
important; where the character,
his environment, political and
other outside circumstances are
indivisible. The more hopeless and
insoluble the situation in which
they are, the more fascinated I am
and the more anxious to see what
means of escape they will find.’
Until Love , then, House Under
the Rocks was his most ideal
subject: the story of a peasant
whose marriage is threatened by
the jealous affection of his sister-
in-law, it is treated with intensity
and a minute observation of
psychological detail. Makk’s pre¬
eminently human approach seems
to have saved Brigade No. 39, made
for the anniversary of the 1919
Hungarian Republic, though the
director himself regrets the film’s
over-all ‘monumental’ approach.
In the 1960s he made seven films,
none of which aroused critical
enthusiasm; film-making alternated
with long intervals of inactivity.
Makk, it seems, is vulnerable to
discouragement. Don’t Keep off the
Grass (i960) was a promising
comic idea about a Minister
obliged to fulfil his show-off
promise to a workman’s large
family, ‘If you don’t get a flat you
shall share mine!’ But the film
suffered from production pressures
and forced revisions. The Fanatics
(1961), viciously attacked at the
time, is a much undervalued film,
a precursor of the whole group of
Hungarian films of the later 1960s
which show individuals of origin¬
ality and enterprise—in this case it
is an irrigation engineer—at odds
with bureaucracy. A dreadful
ending, with a deus ex machina
minister, does not invalidate the
intelligence and genuine criticism
of what has gone before.
Hungarian critics were even
harder on Makk’s next two films,
Lost Paradise (1962) and The Last
But One (1963), apparently on the
grounds that they were too
schematic. After a lengthy interval
he was persuaded to return to
costume comedy; but Makk him¬
self seems to have liked His
Majesty’s Dates even less than his
critics and admits to having been
totally disillusioned after it.
He made television films, and
took over a disastrous Hungarian-
Romanian co-production, A Cloud¬
less Holiday , from Frigyes Ban.
Part of the bargain was that he
would then be allowed to make
Before God and Man , in which he
felt he had a subject as good as
House Under the Rocks : the
dramatic tragedy of a family of
67
Greeks who have stayed in
Hungary after the war. Despite a
lot of enthusiasm and energy the
picture was badly received. By the
end of the Sixties and the start of
work on Love his morale had
suffered severe shocks.
In fact he had had the script of
Love for five years. Since M&nyhert
Simon he had remained friendly
with Tibor Dery. D£ry resisted his
proposal that the two short stories
Love (written in 1956) and Two
Women (1963) could be combined
into a single screenplay, arguing
that the two heroines were very
different; but Makk persisted and
gave Ddry a crash course in movies.
Often the septuagenarian writer
would take with him to the cinema
his friend Gydrgy Lukacs, the
great Marxist philosopher. The
two old gentlemen liked neo-
realism, loved The Gold Rush , but
walked out of Resnais. After six
months, Dery unexpectedly tele¬
phoned Makk and announced that
he had written a script.
From this beginning, writer and
director worked together to arrive
at the final screenplay, which gave
Makk his most substantial critical
success since House Under the
Rocks and re-established his inter¬
national reputation. Success is
clearly his best stimulus. Currently
he is directing a play about Rakosi
for French TV; after this he will
direct Cat and Mouse Play, whose
basic situation of two aged sisters
corresponding in partially menda¬
cious letters (recalling the Two
Women part of Love ) sounds well
suited to his plot preferences and
his comic and kindly vision.
DAVID ROBINSON
Altman’s Images
Robert Altman was in London in
February, cutting his new film,
Images. To help audiences to stop
thinking of him as the man who
made M*A*S*H (and to forestall
their indignation when it turns out
not to be exactly funny), it will
probably be publicised as ‘the story
of a woman who loved her husband
more than she loved herself and
therefore murdered him.’ But
probably is the operative word.
68
Images is not yet finished, and
Altman, who is unusually insistent
on the organic nature of film (‘It’s
like a child, it’s like anything that's
growing. If you start trying to
restrict it, you have a twisted
thing'), is particularly reluctant to
outline the shape of the film to
come.
He admits that when McCabe
and Mrs. Miller was at the same
stage, he was willing, and indeed
eager, to describe it to anyone who
was interested, whereas he feels
that any summary of Images is
bound to be misleading. ‘Which is
probably the best indication I have
that it may be a good film. Who
was it, when he was asked for a
synopsis of his book, said “If I
could have written it shorter, I
would have done it” ?'
In view of his method of
working, Altman’s cautious reti¬
cence seems particularly sensible.
He explains that he usually starts
out with an idea of the kind of
picture he wants to make rather
than with a precise story and that
this idea is apt to be considerably
modified by the collaborative
process of film-making (‘The
hidden artists—there are a lot of
them whose faces you never see—
who work on a picture’). A case in
point is one of the few sequences
in Images about which he was
prepared to be both specific and
enthusiastic.
‘In the script and in the shooting
and in the performance, it was the
most singularly clever sequence in
the picture. I shot forever on it.
The people who worked with me
had never known me use so much
film. I was like George Stevens.
I shot a close-up from this angle,
a close-up from that angle. It was
about a six or seven minute scene.
I even shot a master shot. I shot a
short master, a tight master ... I
shot it so many different ways that
Ren£ Auberjonois got sick eating
spaghetti and everyone else just
got sick of the scene. Then there
was a problem and I thought we’d
have to throw it out of the picture,
but because of all that coverage we
were able to put together an
entirely different scene that I must
say really works now.' Less than a
week after I interviewed him, he
telephoned to say that he’d cut a
further 23 minutes out of the film,
including the sequence he’d men¬
tioned and which he now felt didn’t
work at all.
Altman says that the only
thematic continuity he can find in
his films is a preoccupation with
the flexible boundary between
sanity and insanity. When asked to
define his initial idea for Images ,
he cautiously admits that it’s
‘about a woman who’s insane, or at
least has all the manifestations of
insanity and schizophrenia.’ In
view of his reputation for realistic
detail and his origins in industrial
documentaries, he’s very anxious
to prevent his audience viewing the
film as a clinical documentary about
insanity, insisting that—like all his
films, including M*A*S*H —it's
very much a fairytale.
To underline its fairytale aspect,
and to break away from the
specifically American connotations
of his last three films, he spent
months searching for a suitable
location, ‘looking for an environ¬
ment which didn’t exist.’ Stock¬
holm, Spain, Northern France
and Canada were all considered
before he settled on a remote old
house in Ireland; though from
what you see on the screen, he
insists, you’d have no idea where
the film took place. His characters'
clothes were chosen to avoid
suggesting too precise a period.
To ensure the kind of spatial
dislocation he was after (‘we were
trying not to pin it down to the
mathematician returning to Corn¬
wall with his wife to live'), he
deliberately made his cast of six as
international as possible: Susannah
York (English) is married to Rene
Auberjonois (American), while the
two lovers who haunt her imagin¬
ings are played by Michel Bozzuffi
(French) and Hugh Millais
(Canadian).
‘In M*A*S*H, we tried to give
the audience the feeling that what
they were seeing was just the
window they were stuck at. That if
they’d looked out another window,
they'd have seen a different movie,
though with the same atmosphere.
In Images , you don’t see anybody.
When she drives to the railway
station, there are some people, but
you won’t see them. You don’t see
any other cars, you don’t see
telegraph poles . . . The idea is
that we are dealing totally with the
framework of someone's imagina¬
tion. And when you have a dream,
and you walk into a room, the only
thing that's happening in that room
is what’s important to your dream.
There are no rubber bands on the
floor, no cigarette butts; there's
just the gun in the comer, or the
milk bottle on the table.'
The imagination that Images is
describing is a violent one, and
Altman admits that there's a great
deal of blood in the three classic
murder situations he depicts: a
man shot with a shotgun at point
blank range; another man stabbed
in the neck while taking off his
sweater; a third person driven off a
cliff down a waterfall. But although
the murders will be shown in
graphic detail (unless, of course, he
decides to cut them too), he insists
that they’ll convey no sense of
realism, since in defiance of screen
tradition he has chosen to show the
violence as it affects its victims
without indicating any intention on
the part of the person perpetrating
it.
Like his last three films, Images
will be in Panavision (‘a more
natural look than most of the other
lenses’) and in colour (‘I just don't
see the world in black and white.
It isn’t real'). Yet Altman, who
claims that he uses a zoom lens
almost all the time but seldom uses
the zoom part, and who is un¬
perturbed at the prospect of filling
a wide screen with a six-character
fairytale, owns to a terror of wide
angle lenses: ‘There’s a distortion
to it, and I really don’t like
distortion. Vilmos [Zsigmond]
made some fill-in shots of the house
for Images. I'd told him to go out
and surprise me. And they pan up
from the lake to the house, and the
house is all out of proportion and
I just hate it. Yet it fits in the
picture now so well that I’m
embarrassed.'
While talking about Images , and
reminiscing about Brewster
McCloud (‘the best picture I’ve
made’), Altman is already thinking
out his next two films: one, about
a young person floundering about
Robert Altman on the set
in an alien environment, which he
doesn’t want to discuss in case he
changes his mind in twenty
minutes time; and Thieves Like Us,
set in America in 1936 or 37 and
‘kind of the son of McCabe and
Mrs. Miller He says that since
he’s decided he really enjoys
working, he’s given up believing
that every picture has to be
important. *1 think that you just
keep working, and you can do little
paintings, and big ones, and then
you can do a mural if you want to,
and then go back to little ones.’
Where will Images fit into this
scheme of things ? ‘It’s a small
canvas, but I think it’s going to
look very nice hanging up some
place.*
JAN DAWSON
B.F.I. Award, 1971
The British Film Institute Award
for 1971 (the Sutherland trophy)
has been made to Robert Bresson
for his film Quatre Nuits d'un
Reveur , shown at the NFT during
last year’s London Festival. On the
face of it a conservative choice
perhaps (there were certainly more
immediately innovatory if less
ultimately distinguished films
among the contenders for the 1971
Award), but one that was made
partly in recognition of Bresson’s
work as a whole. If Quatre Nuits
is undeniably a slighter work
than Mouchette or Au Hasard ,
Balthazar, it is no less unmistak¬
ably the unique creation of this
supremely original artist of the
cinema. ‘The language of images is
still so unknown, so new, so
difficult to practise,’ Bresson said
in an interview in the last issue of
sight and sound; which is a
characteristically self-effacing re¬
mark from a director whose super¬
lative achievement in the cinema
has been his understanding of the
essence of that language.
Introducing the interview with
Bresson, Carlos Clarens predicted
a less than favourable future for
Quatre Nuits , and so it has turned
out. The film is evidently not a
commercial success in France, and
in this country is still without a
distributor. One can only hope that
someone will see the light and give
it a commercial run. Bresson,
meanwhile, is still trying to set
up his new production.
Maybe ORTF, which has pro¬
duced a number of feature films
recently, will give Bresson the
support he needs. If Bresson were
Italian, the odds are he'd already
have been signed up by RAI, the
state television network, which has
already backed films by Olmi
(The Scavengers), Fellini (Clowns),
Bertolucci (Spider's Strategy) and
Rossellini (Socrates) and is now
also setting up features with Latin
American directors like Glauber
Rocha and Fernando Solanas.
Since 1968, RAI has moved into
feature film production in a big
way, and now in fact ranks as Italy's
leading producer. With the main
B.F.I. award goes a special
mention to RAI for its enterprise in
this field. A tribute to RAI’s film
programme was mounted at the
National Film Theatre last April;
and its scope—eleven films from
nine directors—gave some idea of
the potential.
‘ Images'
The cross-fertilisation process
(television backing features, direc¬
tors working for television) has
clearly been fruitful, and Bertolucci
was not the first director to
recognise the opportunity for
experiment (‘Television is the only
place where it is possible to go
ahead with research in form’).
Other countries might do well to
look at the RAI idea and its
practical working. Not least the
British television companies, at a
time when not a few talented
directors can’t get work in films.
After all, several of them are
already working for television . . .
making commercials.
Hungarian Sindbad
Any general impression formed by
Western audiences about Eastern
European films could be affected
by a new Hungarian work called
Sindbad. It is the first feature of a
comparatively new director, Zol-
tan Huszarik, who made his name
in 1966 with a 20-minute short
called Elegy , in which he used
colour and music to achieve highly
original effects of poetic violence.
When Huszarik started to film
the interconnected short stories of
an esoteric turn of the century
writer, Gyula Krudy, literary man¬
darins were sceptical. Many won¬
dered whether he would be dis¬
couraged on political (or in his
case, apolitical) grounds; but by
now a thaw had set in, rehabilita¬
ting the Hungarian cultural heri¬
tage even where it was middle-
class in style and spirit. The
veneration accorded literary clas¬
sics may in fact have helped to get
Huszarik’s script approved, so that
for once a serious Hungarian film
has neither an overt social message
nor an implicit reappraisal of
history.
The greatest surprise, however,
is Sindbad's overwhelming popular
success. Hungarian films are sel¬
dom appreciated in their own
country. Apart from light comedies,
the exceptions are films which
depend on a clear story-line and
virtuoso acting: in other words, in
which theatrical values are still
recognisable. But Sindbad has not
even a story-line. It begins with the
protagonist’s body being jolted
across the countryside at daybreak
on a cart; it proceeds by cuts and
dissolves to a series of love scenes,
each with a different woman,
remembered, imagined or pro¬
jected by Sindbad.
Huszarik is a painter and
designer as well as a film-maker.
His chief assistant on the script,
Janos T6th, is better known as a
cameraman (of Karoly Makk’s
Love, for instance). Sandor Sara,
much praised for his inventive
compositions both as a cameraman
and a director (Twelfth Night,
The Upthrown Stone), handled the
shooting. The result of so many
trained eyes is the film’s almost
overpowering visual beauty, and
the soundtrack, with its liberal use
of Mozart, heightens the aesthetic
pleasure.
This Sindbad is not a sailor: he
is a poet or artist whose work is his
life. His travels are imaginary, like
Donne's, and again like Donne,
there is wit as well as sensuality in
the promptings of such a daring
imagination:
Onely let mee love none, no,
but the sport;
From country grasse,
to comfitures of Court,
Or cities quelque choses,
let report
My minde transport.
It is all a long way from Jancsd-
land. Sindbad’s cities are the small
baroque towns of the hill country,
his grass grows between the rust¬
ing iron lacework and moss-laden
crosses of old churchyards. But
this lyrical pastel-coloured roman¬
ticism is for the eye only. The
dialogues, and even more the
69
monologues, are redolent of irony.
When Sindbad loves, he lies, and
his laments mock himself. The
sensuousness of the camera, as it
beautifies food, landscapes and
objects as well as women, might
otherwise become cloying, and the
nostalgic could slide into the
sentimental. Yet it never does:
instead, Huszarik recreates the
metaphysical conceit on film.
MARI KUTTNA
You Be Helen Hayes...
‘Say, kid, how’d you like to be in
pictures?* Does anyone pick up
anyone, even in Hollywood, with
a corny line like that any more?
Doubtful, to say the least. But in
the expanding tourist industry
which the Hollywood studios hope
these days will help swell their
diminishing returns (if no one will
buy the product any more, at least
they can visit the factory), the urge
to be up there with the stars still
obviously counts for a lot. Hence,
no doubt, the latest addition to
Universal’s sub-Disneyland studio
tour, the big daddy of them all, in
that it has been going since 1965.
After a morning’s stately progress
round the monuments—from the
Phantom of the Opera set left over
from Lon Chaney to the Psycho
house, by way of Carol Channing’s
house in Thoroughly Modern
Millie, a cottage once shot at by
Tom Mix, and an automated flood
together with crashing tree-trunk
which can be lifted back into place
for the next batch of suckers by a
light prod from one dainty finger—
there is lunch and then the ptice de
resistance.
Reverently the group of tourists
is led to an actual set from an
actual movie—the interior of the
air liner at the end of Airport.
Visitors are distributed about the
seats within according to the
pattern of the film’s closing
sequences, and are then handed out
lines to say—you be Helen Hayes
and I’ll be. . . To give it all an extra
spice of life, Dean Martin is there,
not quite in person, but specially
videotaped, to make his speech
about not panicking just because
there happens to be a mad bomber
shut in the lavatory. The selected
line-readers respond on cue, and
then wait a moment or two to see—
themselves, in movies at last, or at
least a near videotaped equivalent.
For their performances have been
simultaneously taped, in exactly
the same set-ups as those used in
the original movie, and so now
they can see exactly how they
would look co-starring with Dean
Martin in a tense moment from
one of the top moneymakers in the
whole history of movies (Variety
dixit). See, easy as falling off an
automated plastic log.
JOHN RUSSELL TAYLOR
Scripts Unlimited
Script Development Limited, the
new company recently set up by
Dimitri de Grunwald and Peter
Hall, sounds like a good idea. It’s
described as ‘a radical alternative
to the present chaotic system.’ If
the actual proposals sound a bit
more modest than that, at least
they are rationally directed to¬
wards tackling some of the mala¬
dies of film production at a
realistic point, with no specious
suggestions of instant cure-all.
At present, as Peter Hall points
out, the industry is putting only
some one per cent of its resources
into developing the raw material,
the actual movie scripts. Finan¬
ciers are sold ideas or rough drafts
or treatments; money is then
wasted, and projects collapse, in
getting a script up to the starting
line. Script Development, which
is described as ‘not a producing
company, but a developing and
setting up company,’ aims partly
to reduce the margin of error. ‘The
purpose is to develop the ideas for
scripts of its members (with parti¬
cular emphasis on original subjects)
and to bring those scripts to a
point where they are fully realised
screenplays.* After that, the com¬
pany will ‘prepare a package
of screenplay/director cast/budget,
and will then, with its collective
strength, take on the backers and
distributors to set up the film.*
Peter Hall doesn’t jib at the
suggestion that this sounds rather
like an agency deal, with writers
and directors doing their own
packaging. He points out that in
the present situation, the projects
likeliest to get off the ground are
presold best-sellers, TV series
spin-offs (an endless future of On
the Buses), and properties which
happen to catch the attention of
box-office stars. Script Develop¬
ment hopes to redress the balance
somewhat in favour of screen
originals, and to attract or attract
back writers disillusioned with the
whole time-wasting, shilly-shally¬
ing business of actually getting
their work on to the screen.
Robert Bolt, a founder member
of the company who has just
directed his own first feature,
Lamb, says in a heartfelt way that,
‘The energy used in setting up a
production is likely to leave a
director exhausted when he actually
gets to making the film.* Other
founder members are directors
Anthony Harvey and Christopher
Miles and writer John Hopkins.
Hall and de Grunwald, the joint
managing directors, hope even¬
tually to attract a maximum of
twenty to their stable. They also
hope that some directors may be
encouraged to take more of a hand
in writing, and some writers to
follow Bolt’s lead in directing
their own scripts.
In the company’s first year,
everyone will be giving his services
free. After that, the operating costs
will be met by a levy (amount as
yet unspecified, and presumably
variable) on each film made by the
company’s members. ‘Profits will
be ploughed back, so that work by
members, after the first year, can
be paid for.*
Peter Hall stresses that this isn’t
as altruistic as it might sound.
The idea is not to stimulate ex¬
periment but to produce saleable,
developed projects. Script Develop¬
ment’s progress is likely to depend
on what scripts its members
actually come up with; and on the
strength of its collective line-up.
Mr. de Grunwald, for one, is
optimistic: ‘We believe that talent
doesn’t need money as much as
money needs talent.’
PENELOPE HOUSTON
John Grierson
As this issue was going to press,
news came of the death at the age
of 73 of John Grierson, ‘the father
of British documentary’. In recent
years, because of serious illness, he
had been subjecting himself to a
very austere regime in order
simply to stay alive. But he was
still very active, and still pioneer¬
ing.
Much of Grierson’s last long
vacation from McGill University,
Montreal, where he was professor
of mass communications, was
spent in India working on a survey
for the Canadian government
initially, and ultimately for other
countries concerned with aid pro¬
grammes. When I interviewed
him at his home in Wiltshire last
August, he estimated that over the
previous eighteen months he must
have recorded half a million words
on the whole nature of information.
Characteristically, he saw the
achievement of documentary today
in terms of ‘what it has done and is
doing in the less privileged
countries.’ He cited the example
of India, where 450 million people
out of a total population of 550
million are outside the range of the
so called mass media, accessible
only by word of mouth. ‘There is
a whole world for the documentary’
film to take over,* he said. ‘The
big time is word of mouth, to get
into the word of mouth business. . .
You’re in with all the teachers
then. . . And of course if the teach¬
ing force begins to arm itself with
the serious use of film as a power
of expression for democratic pur¬
poses, then you’ve got yourself a
very, very big development indeed,
which makes all our developments
of the Thirties in England look like
two cents. Oh, I think there are far
bigger things happening than any¬
thing we dreamt of.’
John Grierson with Sydney
Newman
He objected to my question
about his owti greatest achieve¬
ment: ‘I don’t think in those terms
at all.’ But he added, ‘As a
politician, I think the best opera¬
tion, the neatest operation I’ve
ever been associated with, was the
founding of the National Film
Board of Canada. . . I had the
great advantage of having the
sympathy and support of the
Prime Minister there, but it was
in every way a well done thing. It
was very difficult because it meant
liquidating many vested interests,
and it meant a good deal of cruelty
in the liquidation of vested in¬
terests, so don’t think it was an
innocent affair. But as a piece of
public service, rather progressive,
creative public service so far as the
use of the film in the public in¬
terest is concerned, that was a very
tidy job.*
In fact, Grierson was always
most creative not as a film-maker
himself (his one screen credit as
director is for Drifters ), but as a
politician with the practical ability
to open up new worlds for more
than film-makers, and as a teacher
whose firm inspiration showed
people new possibilities within
themselves. Forty years on, all the
original members of his documen¬
tary movement are still linked
together in their loyalty towards
him—a revealing tribute to what
he stood for.
ELIZABETH SUSSEX
Barbra Streisand in Peter Bogdanovich’s ‘ What’s Up, Doc?’
70
George Coulouris and Bernard Herrmann
with Ted Gilling
George Coulouris (left) in ‘Citizen Kane *
George Coulouris, one of the original Mercury Players, was assigned
in Citizen Kane the role of Walter Parks Thatcher, Kane’s guardian.
Bernard Herrmann composed the film’s music score—his first film
assignment. Each separately examined The Citizen Kane Book * prior
to its British publication and national press reviews.
Italicised quotations are taken from
Pauline Kael’s introductory essay
‘Raising Kane’, which accompanies
the first publication of the shooting
script by Herman J. Mankiewicz and
Orson Welles and the cutting con¬
tinuity of the completed film. The
shooting script is interspersed with
eighty-one frame enlargements from
the film.
Herrmann: If anyone who hadn’t seen
Citizen Kane judged the picture by the
quality of the frame enlargements in this
book, I doubt if he would want to see it.
They’re very poor for a book which costs
six pounds. I’ve seen better reproductions
in small paperbacks like Focus on Citizen
Kane. I’d have preferred a book of clear stills
with a running commentary of the picture
accompanying the script.
coulouris: I resent Pauline Kael’s attempt
to explain the film so largely in terms of
Herman Mankiewicz’s past work. If you
look at Mankiewicz’s credits at the back of
the book, it’s hard to connect any of the
stuff he wrote with Citizen Kane. Most of it
is superficial, shallow entertainment. The
whole style of her essay is superficial. She
tries to say that Orson copied this and that
and that some of the film was connected
with a previous assignment of Gregg Toland.
That doesn’t interest me in the least. The
only thing that matters in the end is the
quality of the finished picture.
Young interviewers . . . don't bother to check
the statements of their subjects . . . and thus
leave the impression that the self-aggrandising
stories they record are history ... If one
trusts what appears in print , Welles not only
wrote Kane but just about everything half¬
way good in any picture he ever acted in.
(page 47)
herrmann: There seem to be two schools
of film criticism. One wants to prove that
directors like Welles and Hitchcock did
everything and no one else got a look in.
The other wants to prove that certain
directors never did what they got credit
for. Orson is evidently one of the latter in
Miss Kael’s view.
Those who admire Citizen Kane, which is
constructed to present different perspectives
of a man's life } seem naively willing to accept
Welles' view of its making , namely that it is
his sole creation, (page 48)
[ The secretary of Herman Mankiewicz ] says
that Welles didn't write (or dictate) one line
of the shooting script of Citizen Kane,
(page 38)
herrmann: I’ve only worked with Orson
once since Kane and that was on The
Magnificent Ambersons. I’ve seen him only
occasionally over the years, so I could
hardly be considered sycophantic, or part
of a Welles coterie. But I was associated
with him, as Bernstein says, ‘before the
beginning . . .’ and to try to take away the
achievement of a remarkable artist at that
period is terrible. He did give Herman
Mankiewicz credit from the word go. This
is an attempt to say just the opposite.
*The Citizen Kane Book. Seeker and Warburg,
£6.00.
71
coulouris: Supposing that you isolate the
script. Whether Mankiewicz did it or not,
it was still superior to 99 per cent of the
material being shot in Hollywood at that
time. I’ve always wanted to be in pictures
that had guts and meaning. Actors want
this sort of material because there’s nothing
that makes them look better. But the whole
power of the film is visual; it’s not dialogue.
The first thing I learned in switching from
the stage to films is that lines become sub¬
ordinate. There’s nothing worse than the
endless dialogue you hear in those early
talkies with Ruth Chattcrton doing Frederick
Lonsdale plays. So apart from the fact
that Welles’ direction was vital, the script
has marvellous material and should be
properly credited.
herrmann: Film being a mosaic art, that
doesn’t alter the fact that it’s still Welles*
film. Mr. Mankiewicz has not been in obli¬
vion. The screenplay credit says ‘By Herman
Mankiewicz and Orson Welles*. That’s
what we should accept and be content to
live with. His name has been on the credits
for everyone to see from the beginning. I
have the music credit for Kane , Welles
didn’t write it, but that’s not the point. It’s
part of the picture. The newsreel in Kane
was cut and scored by the newsreel depart¬
ment at RKO at Orson’s request. He said
they had their own crazy way of cutting and
they were the only people to do it.
Kane among newspapers
What Miss Kael doesn’t understand is
that the film in the end has nothing to do
with the damn screenplay really. It’s the
springboard. Nobody goes to look at Kane
just for the story. It’s how it’s done.
Audiences are like children; they don’t mind
hearing the same story over and over again.
It’s how you tell it. It depends on so many
factors. Lighting, camerawork, set design,
performances—anything could have upset
the equilibrium and sabotaged the picture.
Whoever wrote the script, it wouldn’t have
been Citizen Kane with anyone but Welles
directing it.
Part of the real fascination of Kane for me
is that it’s one of the few pictures ever made
which constructs the portrait of a character.
I’ve always thought that Orson was in¬
fluenced by a popular novel of the time
called I Am Jonathan Scrivener . All its
characters talk about a man they know. In
the last sentence, the doorbell rings and the
butler announces Mr. Jonathan Scrivener.
You never see him. It’s famous and Orson
was very fond of it. But there are always
various influences when a work of art is
developing.
Mankiewicz was trying to give a compre¬
hensive view of the contradictions that emerge
when an idealist attempts to succeed in business
and politics. Fragments of this are lefty but
their meaning is no longer clear, (page 60)
[Mankiewicz] couldn't write the character
as a tragic fallen hero because he couldn't
resist making him funny. Mankiewicz had
been hacking out popular comedies and melo¬
dramas far too long to write drama; one does
not dictate tragedy to a steno-typist. (page 73)
coulouris : I don’t think Pauline Kael suc¬
ceeds in building up Mankiewicz at Welles*
expense because it’s not consistent. Half
the time, she’s trying to prove that the
movie is a shallow masterpiece—kitsch
which Mankiewicz was suitable to do as a
wisecracking, shallow person. The other
half, she’s saying the picture is marvellous.
herrmann: It’s part of the whole current
critical scene to belittle most of this century’s
achievements. Richard Strauss is kitsch and
a second-rater like Mahler is suddenly a
master. The trouble with this book is a
confrontation between amateurs and pro¬
fessionals. These people who write books
about Kane are amateurs. Why doesn’t a
first class director or cameraman write about
it or get Mr. Welles to talk, as Peter Bog¬
danovich is doing ?
Welles had a vitalising , spellbinding talent:
he was the man who brought out the best in
others and knew how to use it. What keeps
Citizen Kane alive is that Welles wasn't
prevented from trying things out . . . Kane
is not a great work that suddenly burst out
of a young prodigy's head ... It is a superb
example of collaboration, (pages 74-75)
coulouris: What you have to ask is what
the result might have been with any other
director. I think she hasn’t completely under¬
stood the movie atmosphere at that time.
She is right that there was an immense feel¬
ing of frustration in everybody; they all
enjoyed making a lot of money and all
yearned to do something marvellous. But
the point is that Welles struck it lucky in
another medium, got carte blanche in Holly¬
wood and refused to throw away a magnifi¬
cent tactical position. I think that movies
are particularly attuned to gigantic themes
and Orson developed one in his first film.
Whether you credit Toland or Mankiewicz
for their contributions or not, Orson is still
the focal point because of his breakthrough.
He attracted talented people to himself and
achieved, with their help, something special.
For the people who did much of the work on
Welles' projects , the temptation must have
been strong to expose what they considered
this saviour's feet of clay, (page 38)
herrmann: I’ve done over forty films since
Citizen Kane and none of them was in the
same league. That doesn’t make it the end-
all masterpiece, but if I’d had the luck to
end my career working with Orson instead
of starting with him, I’d still say that he
was by far the most exciting person to make
a film with because of his sheer creativeness.
I’ve worked with other distinguished direc¬
tors, but they’re very secretive about their
vision. With Welles, you always knew what
he was looking for. He was precocious, with
a great streak of originality. He has no
intellectual backbone as an artist; he’s a
great improviser in the sense that Beecham
was a great improvisational conductor. The
Mercury Players were a superb orchestra.
When Orson had his own people around
him, things happened. I’m not saying that
Mankiewicz didn’t make a contribution. I
daresay he did. Everybody did, including
most of Orson’s drinking partners like
Preston Sturges and John Barrymore. Orson
has never said it was his sole creation.
Everybody made his own contribution and
that’s film-making. It’s not a mystique.
What I . . . now found almost mysteriously
beautiful was Orson Welles' performance . . .
Welles is one of the most self-conscious of
actors , and this is what is so nakedly re¬
vealed when he's playing a young man of his
ozvn age and he's insecure about what's coming
through ... I think there's no doubt that he's
more sure of himself when he's playing this
somewhat older Kane . . . (page 55)
coulouris: Welles was rarely satisfied with
his own acting. He felt nervous and un¬
comfortable and often took it out on some¬
body else. We had a peculiar relationship
in which we made fun of each other. But I
made many films after Kane and one thing
I’ve noticed is its intensity and power—more
than would be tolerable in many films. The
scene in which we argue back and forth in
the newspaper office is not conventional
movie acting. With other actors or another
director, it would have been ‘brought down*
a lot and lost a good deal. There were no
great portentous conferences. It was prag¬
matic trial and error.
* Foible' is the word that Welles' former
associates tend to apply to his assertions of
authorship, (page 40)
herrmann: Both of us have criticisms of
Welles; we haven’t even gone into his pros
and cons, but it would be very difficult to
sit by and see this kind of injustice done to
him. Neither this nor Charles Higham’s
book on Orson has his participation. I’m
sure he’s having a giant, Falstaffian laugh
at them because all these books and essays
are like Kane itself. Everybody’s trying to
find out what Rosebud is . . . But Orson is
quite right. Why should he waste his time
with these so-called intellectuals saying that
he had a formula for something or that some¬
one else did part of the work ? I admire him
for that. Kane was arrived at through an
inner compulsion on the part of Orson
Welles. Having known him as I did, I
would say that it was part of the fibre of the
man.
[Pauline Kael's essay refers to Ferdinand
Lundberg's 1947 lawsuit against Welles ,
Mankiewicz and RKO for copyright in¬
fringement of the book ‘Imperial Hear si'.
Having examined Welles' testimony given in
1950, she concludes]. He seemed more con¬
cerned with continuing the old pretence that
the movie was not about Hearst than with
refuting Lundberg's charge of plagiarism.
(page 81)
herrmann: Whatever inspires an artist is
his own affair, whether it’s William Ran¬
dolph Hearst, Harold McCormick or Joe
Doakes. There was a tradition in America,
particularly in the Middle West, where
Orson was bom, of this type of million¬
aire. Orson heard all the legends, partic¬
ularly about McCormick, when he was a
boy. Dr. Bernstein told me that the picture
was not specifically about Hearst. If old
man Hearst hated Welles so much, why did
he employ Welles’ former guardian as one
of his physicians ? Bernstein said that
72
Hearst had Kane run for him toward the end
of his life and asked ‘What’s all the fuss
about?’ I think it’s a bit of everybody of
that period, about a man who has Alad¬
din’s lamp and can do anything he likes.
In a way, it’s a dreamlike autobiography
of Welles.
When [Welles] was read a long list of events
in the film that parallel Hearst 9 s life ... he
came up with the surprising information that
the film dealt ‘quite as fully with the world of
grand opera as with the world of newspaper
publishing ’. (pages 81-82)
herrmann : When we were kids, there used
to be a ‘tune detector’ called Sigmund
Spaeth. He used to be able to prove that
no matter what the orchestra was playing,
it was from something else. Miss Kael is
trying to be a script detector. There are
rumours about the identity of the girl on
whom Schlcsinger based Darling. But who
cares ? What counts is that it is a wonderful
film. It reminds me of when Brahms wrote
his great First Symphony, many super¬
sensitive people pointed out to him that the
melody of the last movement was the same
as the Beethoven Ninth Symphony. He said,
‘Any jackass would notice that.’
coulouris : It’s all academic, isn’t it ? How
many angels could dance on the head of a
pin or what would the ‘Eroica’ have been
if Napoleon hadn’t become Emperor ? While
the researchers try to discover Napoleon’s
effect on Beethoven, who is assessing the
symphony ?
Mankiewicz had been taken off Night at the
Opera but what he and Welles—with the
assistance of Bernard Herrmann—did to the
opera in Citizen Kane was in almost exactly
the same style, and as funny ... As Man¬
kiewicz planned it , Susan was to make her
debut in Massenet's Thais . . . but to use
Thais would have cost a fee , so Bernard
Herrmann wrote choice excerpts of a fake
French-Oriental opera — Salammbd (pages
66, 67)
herrmann : Pauline Kael was never in touch
with me while the book was being written.
The musical information is rubbish. If the
rest of her opinions are as accurate as her
statements about the music, none of it is
to be taken very seriously. She’s trying to
say that after bringing a group of people to
Hollywood and paying them salaries for
months, they couldn’t have paid a modest
fee for Thais. The truth is that no music
in Thais or any other opera would create
the impact of the scene—a terrified girl lost
in the quicksand of a powerful orchestra.
The orchestra plays for forty seconds to
develop a tremendous tension before she
sings. It had nothing to do with the Brothers
Marx.
Mankiewicz, catering to the public , gave it
the empty , stupid , no-talent blonde it wanted
. . . Movie audiences assumed that Marion
Domes was a pathetic whiner like Susan
Alexander . . . (page 70)
herrmann: Miss Kael is so wrong when
she pokes fun at Susan. The girl arouses
Kane’s protective instincts. He wouldn’t
have been attracted by a glamorous beauty.
He saw them all day long. Orson is the
greatest Romantic director the films have
ever had, and next in line is Hitchcock.
Mor.kiiwicz and Welles] were big eaters ,
big talkers, ^big spenders, big talents; they
were not men of what is ordinarily called
\good character'. They were out to get not
only Hearst but each other, (page 33)
coulouris: Imaginary twaddle.
herrmann : I found that in my professional
dealings with Orson, he was always a pro.
What he did the rest of the time is his
personal life and nothing to do with our
work. It’s of no interest to me whatever.
There are monsters and there are also sacred
monsters. Both Welles and Mankiewicz
deserve places in the sacred monster category
. . . [They] wanted to do something that
would cap the invasion of the Martians . . .
(page 32)
herrmann: Rubbish.
coulouris : Quite legitimate, I should think.
Why the hell not ? Showmanship is part of
movies. Why not a subject which would
electrify and startle people? I waited ten
months to do the picture while they pre¬
pared it. Orson called me to his house one
evening. It was on a mountain top outside
Los Angeles. We went out on to the terrace
and saw the whole city lit up. The war was
on. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘one of the few cities
left in the world with the lights on.’ Then
he described Citizen Kane to me, outlining
the whole story, standing there with the
stars above and the lights of Los Angeles
below. They were working on the script
then.
herrmann: I think that part of the resent¬
ment Miss Kael shows toward Kane stems
from the fact that it’s not from a play or
book, but from an original screenplay. It’s
always written that Hitchcock, for example,
created Psycho or Vertigo. They were
written from Robert Bloch by Joseph
Stefano, and by Alec Coppel and Sam
Taylor from Boilcau and Narcejac. Hitch¬
cock didn’t have the idea of Psycho , but
Orson had the idea of Kane.
The scope of Welles' reputation seems to have
infuriated Hollywood; it was a cultural re¬
proach from the East, (page 40)
herrmann: That is true. All of us were
resented for coming to Hollywood. In my
own case, I was told by the heads of many
The beginning and the end of Citizen Kane
music departments that there was no room
for people like me there. They had a tight
little corporation going.
coulouris : There was no resentment of the
actors. I had to take a job with Warner
Brothers in All This and Heaven Too because
I was off the payroll while they were pre¬
paring Kane. I didn’t find any resentment
at the studios, but it was different for
Benny because he’s a very good musician
and he would be taking a whole department
away from somebody and they arc all scared
of that. But they’re not scared of an actor
in the same way. I thought it was a wonderful
idea for Orson to use radio actors whose
faces weren’t known, to make a fresh impact.
American writers . . . went to Hollywood
and . . . experienced it as a prostitution of
their talents . . . Though more than one fell
in love with movies and thus suffered not only
from personal frustration but from the cor¬
ruption of the great, still new art ... (page 10)
herrmann: I think the greatest thing that
ever happened to Herman Mankiewicz,
whatever his contribution, was that he met
Welles, not the other way round. If Welles
hadn’t created Kane, he would have made
some other equally remarkable picture.
Mankiewicz’s credits don’t show any other
remarkable scripts. His only moment in the
sun was when he came across Orson Welles.
And none of us on the film, including Mr.
Mankiewicz, ever thought that this was any¬
thing anybody was going to worry about.
It’s a job of work one did, a part of one’s
professional life.
You know, most screenwriters of the
period were ‘the Great American Novelist*
being whores and hoping for better things.
They were always about to write a great
novel or great play while demeaning them¬
selves with movie writing. I was at a party
at William Dieterle’s house which Thomas
Mann attended. One of these writers, quite
drunk, came up to him and said something
like ‘How could a wonderful writer like you
even talk to miserable whores like us?’
Mann looked at him and said, ‘My dear
sir, you are not big enough to make your¬
self so small.’ ■
73
Watching a Delvaux film is rather like taking a stroll through a stately mansion.
Graceful and leisurely, long corridors unfold, bringing with them a sense of
indefinable mystery; and then suddenly, just around the corner in its appointed
place on the wall, a familiar face, a landscape, a style one knows and recognises.
I am thinking particularly of the train sequence in Un Soir . . . un Train , with its
silent, wintry landscapes by courtesy of Brueghel, or of the old Dutch masters
who painted the still-lifes for food and furniture, not to mention Anna Karina
at the window with her mixing-bowl, in Rendez-vous a Bray.
The echoes here are specific, but throughout his work one is never allowed to
forget that Delvaux’s vision stems from the land of the great Flemish painters.
His first feature, The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Shorty with its extraordinary
sense of beauty and horror inextricably intertwined, of a man’s mind cracking
open to reveal the terror festering within it, might have been imagined by
Hieronymus Bosch. But as Richard Roud has observed, its style, poised less
precariously on the brink of madness, lies closer to contemporary Flemish artists
like Magritte and Paul Delvaux who ‘use an almost academic technique of paint¬
ing in order to represent the fantastic, the unbelievable, the impossible.’
Delvaux’s world, then, is one of calm bour¬
geois interiors carved out of the surrounding
darkness, of utter normality which suddenly
finds itself struggling to keep safely within
its circle of light. Mealtimes arc moments
of crucial importance to Delvaux, perhaps
because something so essentially a private,
animal activity as eating has been turned
by convention into one of the great social
occasions. At any rate, one remembers
Govert Miereveld at the beginning of The
Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short , alone
with his obsessive vision of beauty, blotting
out the familiar little sounds of domestic
activity as he lingers dreamily over his
breakfast. Then his litde daughter enters to
dip her sugar in his coffee, and from that
moment, as though future trespassers were
to be forbidden access to his inner world, he
wipes his family from his mind in order to
devote himself exclusively to his phantom.
And in Un Soir . . . un Train, it is over a
romantically candle-lit meal, designed by
Mathias (Yves Montand) as a tribute to
their love, that Anne (Anouk Aimee) makes
her first tangible movement of withdrawal
from him, leading them into the voyage of
discovery which shows them that what they
took to be a deep, abiding love is in fact a
yawning abyss of emptiness.
Journeys, too, are a central motif: timid
sorties from the ring of security which leave
the traveller defenceless, lost in a strange
land and shattered by his discovery that
‘beauty is a window open on a wound’. This
phrase (or more correctly, its reverse: ‘A
wound is a window open on beauty, on a
marvellous world called flesh’) comes from
The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short,
where it is put into Govert’s mind by the
pathologist whose autopsy on a drowned
man sends him spiralling into madness by
its revelation of the corruption of beauty;
but it might equally well apply to Mathias
in Un Soir . . . un Train. Throughout this
film Anne is a mysterious, melting, loving
presence for Mathias, conjured from the
past as well as existing in the present.
Their love seems perfect until she, still
tender, still desiring and desirable, with¬
draws because she insists that there is some¬
thing lacking between them. Then comes the
journey in which she, after angrily walking
away in the street because he (for reasons
of political circumspection) does not want
Left: Anna Karina , Mathieu Carriere in * Rendez¬
vous & Bray *
her to accompany him, turns up on the train
after all. With an unspoken reconciliation
seemingly resting between them, the train
halts in the middle of nowhere, Anne
vanishes, and Mathias, after a nightmarish
flight through desolate, wintry fields to a
ghost town where the inhabitants engage
him in a weird danse macabre , wakes to find
that the train has crashed and that Anne
has been killed.
To read this sequence as an allegory of
the supernatural, a flight of pseudo¬
philosophy about life and death along the
lines of Outward Bound, is surely to miss
the entire point of the film, which is, as in
The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short, to
trace the process whereby a man’s mind
may be freed from chimera. The theme,
implied throughout, is underlined by the
production of Everyman on which Anne is
working as costume designer and from which
she culls her belief that ‘Conscience and
lucidity may conquer Death’. In trying to
provoke Mathias into a closer exploration
of the relationship between them which he
takes for granted, Anne is not trying to fend
off death itself, of course, but la petite rnort,
the slow erosion which uses indifference,
habit and lack of understanding as its
weapons.
Mathias is too content, too secure in his
belief in the endurance of their love, to wish
or need to explore. Throughout the film,
however, tiny rifts occur in his peace of
mind, connecting to illuminate for him
Anne’s increasing sense of isolation, her
desire to reject her hard-won independence
as a career woman, to marry, to be secure,
to have a child before it is too late. Crucially,
for instance, there is Anne’s fear, as a
Frenchwoman in Belgium, a land torn by
ferocious linguistic riots, when the tram on
which they are travelling seems threatened
by Flemish militants. More subtly, a visit
to Mathias’ mother in an old people’s home
brings intimations of mortality as her
gnarled hand presses an apple on him and
she asks whether he has a son yet; an inti¬
mation cruelly extended when he later re¬
calls, in flashback, how Anne once gave,
casually it seemed then, an apple to a stray
child; and yet again when he goes to the
cemetery with a bunch of flowers but cannot
find his father’s grave.
All these elements are brought together
in the nightmare sequence, which is con¬
structed out of a dreamlike rearrangement
of his memories and anxieties, to illuminate
the flash of conscience and lucidity in which
Mathias at last sees that, like Anne, he is a
stranger in a strange land. The barren,
desolate landscape is the reality of his
relationship with Anne; the tawdry little
palace of entertainment is studded with
coloured lights which cheapen the delicate
enchantment of the Christmas decorations
that hovered over his memory of his first
meeting with Anne; the elderly professor
and the student who accompany him on his
odyssey from the train suggest the father
he has lost and the son he has never had;
the hostile townsfolk, babbling strange
tongues and silently gobbling gourmet din¬
ners, cruelly parody the romantic agony of
his last meal with Anne. Above all, with
beauty again becoming a window opening
on a wound, his new lucidity reveals that
his last image of Anne in the corridor of the
train, serene and exquisite and forgiving,
was as deceptive as the rest. Nothing has
changed in the dying landscape of their
love except that, now that he knows, it is
too late.
If Delvaux has a skeleton key to the
inner life of his films, it is surely this image
of ideal, impossible beauty—Beata Tyszkie-
wicz in the dazzlingly luminous shot which
hovers over the beginning of The Man Who
Had His Hair Cut Short; Anouk Aimee in
the corridor of the train, or making her mute
appeal from the flashback to a wintry forest
in Un Soir . . . un Train; Anna Karina,
mysteriously distorted by candlelight, but
finally revealed as a tranquil, reassuring
silhouette as she stands in the window in
Rendez-vous a Bray —a distant yet elusively
beckoning beauty, which sings the siren
song of Baudelaire’s LTnvitation au Voyage:
Mon enfant, ma soeur,
Songe a la douceur
D’aller 14 -bas vivre ensemble!
Aimer a loisir
Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te ressemble!
Les soleils mouilles
De ces ciels brouiltes
Pour mon esprit ont les charmes
Si myst£rieux
De tes traitres yeux,
Brulant a travers leurs larmes.
This pays qui te ressemble, with its alluring
sun mysteriously veiled behind a blurred
and misting sky, could hardly be bettered
as a description of the strange countries of
the mind traversed by both Govert and
Mathias in their pursuit of a chimera.
Rather surprisingly, since both these her¬
metic and secretive films are based on novels
by the Flemish writer Johan Daisne, where¬
as Rendez-vous d Bray is adapted from a
much more open-ended short story (Le Roi
Cophetua) by the French novelist Julien
Gracq, Delvaux’s third film is moulded
from precisely the same mental crucible.
Indeed, in both plot and atmosphere,
Rendez-vous a Bray might almost be con¬
sidered as the third panel of a triptych
illustrating a progress akin to Dante’s In¬
ferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.
Without changing a word of Gracq’s
story, Delvaux has his hero, Julien Eschen-
bach (Mathieu Carriere), retrace the steps
of Govert and Mathias when he is lured on
a journey into the unknown by a mysterious
telegram from an old friend, Jacques Nueil,
asking Julien to meet him at La Fougeraie,
his country house near Bray-la-For^t. The
75
Ml
‘Un Soir . . . un Train\ Above: Hector Camerlynck and Yves Montand at dinner at the
phantom inn. Below: Mathias ’ last image of Anne {Anouk Aimee) in the train corridor.
year is 1917, and as he leaves Paris by train,
Julien finds himself in an alien world of
soldiers on leave or returning to the front,
of silence and hostile stares as strangers eye
his civilian clothes. The train, travelling
towards the front and away from the warmth
and reassuring normality of Paris, seems to
penetrate into a world of silence which
becomes a reality as he reaches Bray, a
ghostly, windswept village of deserted
streets and autumnal trees, and where the
only signs of life, until he reaches the for¬
lornly overgrown gateway of La Fougcraic
and pulls the bell, are two children who shy
away at his approach.
The housekeeper, monosyllabic and re¬
served, shows him into a cheerful, com¬
fortably appointed study where he begins
his long, solitary vigil which ends, not with
the arrival of Jacques Nueil, but with his
apotheosis in the arms of the enigmatic
housekeeper (who may be no housekeeper
at all, perhaps Jacques’ wife or mistress).
All this follows, almost image by image, the
meticulous descriptions in Gracq’s story,
not only in detail but in elusive implication.
While waiting for the arrival of his host, for
instance, Julien makes a tour of the study
reminiscent of Garbo’s farewell to her room
in Queen Christina , running his fingers over
the piano, leafing through the music, trying
the chairs, touching and savouring this room
he has never seen before. It is almost an
evocation of Jacques, and one knows that
he will never arrive to keep his rendezvous
in this room. For, in Gracq’s words, it is
one of those ‘demeures-musees oil, dans
1’angle d’une des pieces que le visiteur
traverse, une chalne tendue et un dcriteau
isolent la table, la chaise, l’encrier, les plumes
encore taillees qu’a consacrees autrefois une
main illustre, et oil non le tremblement de la
vie, mais plutot une rigidity mortuaire
saisit ce desordre dpoussete.’
Jacques may or may not be dead (since
he is an aviator on active service, it is very
much on the cards), but the room is in any
case a memorial to something else: to the
death of his friendship with Julien, a friend¬
ship which Julien still treasures fondly in
his memory, but which is long dead and
gone. The first flashback (on the train taking
him to La Fougeraie) is a joyous one of him¬
self with Jacques and their friend Odile
making a Jules and Jim trio in an open sports
car. But as he waits in the study at La
Fougeraie, his memories become gradually
muted by recollection of Jacques’ vociferous
criticism of his refusal to compromise his
art as a musician by playing at a society
soirde, and his subsequent lapse into silent
reproach, all the more bitter because it is
unexplained.
It is hereabouts, killing two birds with
one stone, that Delvaux makes his one major
departure from Gracq’s story, entirely
changing its implication. In the original,
Julien—or rather the unnamed narrator—
has been invalided out of the army after
being wounded in Flanders in the winter
of 1914. Delvaux’s Julien has remained a
civilian: because he is a native of neutral
Luxemburg, he explains, and his foreign
accent would cause problems; but we are
left in no doubt by his over-eagerness to
explain and justify that he is anxious to save
his skin. His cowardice brings a dividend to
the extraordinary moment when the whole
76
house begins to tremble, chandeliers, de¬
canters and tea-tray chattering anxiously as
a distant bombardment starts up somewhere
at the front. Gracq’s narrator takes it in his
stride, but Julien’s nervous questions—‘The
front is twelve kilometres away,* the house¬
keeper reassures him composedly—pinpoint
the gulf that has widened between the two
friends. For, to put it much more crudely
than the film ever does, Jacques is staking
his life for an ideal, while Julien the idealist
is simply letting things ride.
Once again, one might almost say, since
Julien—unlike Go vert, who set off in blind
pursuit of an ideal, and unlike Mathias, who
thought he had already found his—is
revealed as someone who has always refused
to commit himself. Cool, priggish and olym¬
pian, certain of his own superiority, he guards
his purity by maintaining a regal detachment
and by employing a delicate balance of
values. He is willing to earn money by acting
as accompanist to silent films in a cinema,
for instance, but not to play after dinner for
social snobs who might perhaps be able to
give him a helping hand in fulfilling his
ambition to become a concert pianist. And
on a rather subtler level, elliptically suggested
in the curious flashback scene at the inn, he
is willing to share his friendship for Jacques
with Odile, but reluctant even to consider,
let alone to act upon, the hint that Odile
may be in love with him. So, as the little
girl playing hopscotch beneath his bedroom
window just as he sets out for La Fougeraie
forewarns him in her little rhyme set to a
Brahms melody, ‘Le Paradis n’est pas pour
toi . . . Le Paradis est pour le Roi.’
Like the bird in the little girl’s song
which loses all its feathers, however, Julien
is gradually stripped of his defences until,
ensnared by the housekeeper’s tantalisingly
remote and tranquil beauty, he finally com¬
mits himself by sleeping with her. This is
the moment, adumbrated in the little girl’s
song and by the painting that hangs on the
wall of the room at La Fougeraie where the
housekeeper patiently waits on Julien at
dinner (a key scene again), when King
Cophetua stoops to love the beggar-maid.
But it is also something more. Apotheosis, I
said earlier, but I am not quite sure how one
should describe the sense of momentous
decision, of transformation in Julien, as he
takes the passive, yet somehow hieratic,
housekeeper into his arms, and later stares
at her wondcringly as she lies on the pillow
beside him.
Was the whole affair planned by Jacques,
with the connivance of the housekeeper, to
effect this transformation in his friend?
Neither Gracq nor Delvaux explains, though
both leave the matter open to speculation.
But where Gracq has his narrator (and the
reader) tolerably convinced that Jacques has
been killed—not only by his description of
the room as a memorial museum and of his
wait there as a vigil, but by his reading of a
newspaper report of an aerial mission from
Jacques’ base which pointedly does not
conclude with the ritual ‘none of our aircraft
is missing’—Delvaux withholds any tangible
clues until the very end of the film. Then,
as Julien steals away from the house to catch
the first train back to Paris, he plants evi¬
dence to suggest exactly the opposite from
Gracq. For Julien borrows a newspaper from
a soldier on the platform which contains a
report to the effect that all aircraft have been
grounded for three days because of bad
weather. Hitherto determined to leave for
Paris, Julien now hesitates, perhaps for the
first time in his life, uncertain as to the
motives of either Jacques or the house¬
keeper but certain that he must now be
fully committed to them both. And as the
camera irises down on his moment of hesi¬
tation outside the railway station, the little
girl’s voice reiterates, ‘Le Paradis est pour
le Roi.’
Rendez-vous a Bray , despite its basic sim¬
plicity, is not an easy film to unravel because
one has to approach it as though one were
deaf and dumb, trusting to one’s sense of
sight and touch because nuances are never
put into words. After the bombardment in
which the whole house gently trembles, for
instance, suddenly all the lights go out, and
there is a magnificent moment of release,
and yet somehow almost of menace, when the
housekeeper appears in the doorway to the
study bearing a lighted candelabra. For
Gracq, describing the sense of ambivalence
in Delvaux’s image is easy: ‘Le geste du
bras eleve resta suspendu, avec une nuance
de complaisance songeuse, une seconde de
plus qu’il n’eut fallu pour chercher la
table—un peu comme on 6claire le visage
d’un malade qui dort, un peu comme une
ronde de nuit qui s’assure de la presence
d’un prisonnier.’
Invalid and prisoner . . . Julien is both,
incarcerated until he is cured of his malady
in this mysterious mansion which might be,
like the Beast’s castle in La Belle et la Bete ,
under a magic spell awaiting release by love,
or as Julien feels before he is caught in its
calming web, one of those dark caverns in
which Fantomas lurks, waiting to lure his
victims to destruction. For—and this is
pure invention by Delvaux—the whole film
is made under the sign of Feuillade. Not
merely the quaint resuscitation of the use
of the iris; not merely the extract from
Fantdmas which we watch at the cinema
where Julien is employed as accompanist;
but the fact that Julien, like the intrepid
Fandor, is a journalist, and like him, is
continually baffled in his pursuit of the
diabolically cunning Fantomas (Jacques?)
and in his entanglement with the latter’s two
enigmatic loves, dark Lady Beltham (the
housekeeper ?) and the pale Hel&ne (Odile ?).
The whole film is therefore predicated
on two conflicting impulses, magnificently
realised in Ghislain Cloquet’s superbly rich
and delicate camerawork (if possible, even
more beautiful than his work on Un Soir ...
un Train): the pure romantic urge towards
the security of the castle and its mysterious
princess, and the anguished shying away
from the terrible traps which may lie waiting
there. The two coalesce to provide la
sicuriti qui coula de cette nuit (Gracq).
For next morning at dawn, although Julien
is alone and hesitant, shorn of his purity
in a no man’s land between Paris and La
Fougeraie, he has found a kind of security;
perhaps because, as Delvaux commented in
an interview, his purity before meant only
that he meant nothing to anybody.
Like Govert and Mathias, Julien has dis¬
covered that beauty is a window open on a
wound (maybe Jacques’ wound, maybe the
housekeeper’s). Like them, he has achieved
conscience and lucidity. Unlike them, he
survives unscarred, perhaps to move on
from this purgatory into paradise. ■
‘ Rendez-vous a Bray\ Dinner at La Fougeraie: Anna Karina and Mathieu Carriere
77
You’d think that an autobiographical film by the director of 81 would attract
considerable critical attention, but Fellini: A Director's Notebook has been almost
completely ignored since it appeared in 1969. Evidently the reason for this is that
it was made for American television (NBC) and, unlike Fellini’s second tele¬
vision film, The Clowns , not shown in theatres. But with some of our most
important directors turning to TV for backing these days (Renoir, Welles,
Rossellini, Godard, et al ), critics are going to have to lose some of their snobbish¬
ness about the medium.
The notebook has long been an accepted
literary form, but Fellini’s is the first of its
kind in the commercial cinema, despite the
recent proliferation of films about directors,
including two about Fellini himself. It was
made at the end of a very difficult period in
his life, when he had given up a project
which had occupied him for three years.
The Voyage of Mastorna , had suffered a
total physical collapse, and had just returned
to work with a short exercise film, the Never
Bet the Devil Your Head episode of the three-
part Edgar Allan Poe film Spirits of the
Dead (Histoires Extraordinaires ), a feverish
tale about a film star whose hallucinations
on a trip to Cinecitta finally lead him to his
death. It was not hard to draw a connection
78
between the character and Fellini himself.
Andrew Sarris made a perceptive comment
on what it revealed of Fellini’s artistic
dilemma: ‘If Fellini can trot out the same old
satirical routines at the drop of a hat or an
option, what possible personal meaning
could they ever have had? At what point,
therefore, does a personal cinematic language
become a tired cliche ? . . . Fellini has spent
a whole decade on this theme, and we are
now moving into the Seventies. Perhaps
his Satyricon will be a source of artistic
renewal or, in some ultimate way, an occa¬
sion for artistic release of his more repeti¬
tious mannerisms’.
The Satyricon's theme was, in both its
historical and personal senses, the clearing
away of dead conventions and obsessions
in a new spirit of moral freedom. Its
marvellous ending, with the young men
climbing into the boat as the old men sit
on shore eating the poet’s corpse, made
this surreally explicit. And I think the
reason why The Satyricon was the kind of
renewal Sarris hoped for, rather than just
an occasion for the release of obsessions,
was that Fellini was able to take stock of
himself on film in A Director's Notebook
before shooting it.
Although the film may seem at first
glance to be a disconnected grab bag of gags,
skits and memorabilia, it is actually a
rigorous development of the theme of
artistic stasis which Fellini pursued in 8 $.
A development, not a regression: this is a
film about how a man breaks loose from his
artistic inhibitions and finds the moral
strength to move forward and work again.
Why did Fellini turn to documentary ?
Perhaps because he felt that he had gone so
far into the fantasy mode that he became
barren and stultified (Giulietta of the Spirits
is a dead end in many ways) and needed to
re-establish contact with the real world.
This has happened before in Fellini’s
career. He began, after all, as a script¬
writer in the neo-realist movement, and his
first decade of directing was marked by a
constant flux between theatrical fantasy and
neo-realism, often within the same film.
La Dolce Vita was a grand attempt to impose
his fantasy life on to the reality of modern
Rome (as his new film, Roma , evidently is),
and from there Fellini veered completely
into the interior world.
A Director's Notebook , admittedly, is fully
accessible only to those familiar with
Fellini’s oeuvre ; but this should not be an
excuse for keeping it in obscurity. If I
would not presume to put it in the first
rank of Fellini’s work (even though I enjoy
it more than, say, ££, though less than The
Nights of Cabiria ), this is because the limita¬
tions of the notebook form are inherent in
its virtues. There are parts of A Director's
Notebook which are frankly awful, notably
a scene of a bunch of whores and truck
drivers cavorting in ancient Roman dress
along the Appian Way which is about on the
level of those Fellini pastiches that dis¬
figure every student film festival. There are
also parts of the film which rank with his
best work; the long concluding sequence, a
series of bizarre characters auditioning for
roles in The Satyricon , moved me more
than anything else he has done. But the
special charm of A Director's Notebook
comes from its inclusion of the bad along
with the good, the silly with the sublime.
If Fellini had exercised conventional artistic
discretion and retained only the most
‘presentable’ sequences, we would have lost
much of the insight into his personality;
which, in the end, is what we hope to find
in a notebook.
Fellini’s preparations for filming his
Satyricon form the running thread of the
narrative. And since he is still in the free-
associative stage of preparation (we don’t
see him actually shooting it until the very
end, under the credits), the format is loose
enough to let him go off on tangents only
vaguely related to the central thread. The
film divides into ten segments:
(1) A visit to a group of hippies living in
an abandoned set for Mastorna ; a look at
some of the props and set designs in a
warehouse; and a brief glimpse of what the
film would have been like.
(2) A visit to the freaky night people who
inhabit the Colosseum, as part of Fellini’s
attempt to seek parallels between modem
and ancient Rome for The Satyricon (and
for Roma ?).
(3) Fellini’s wife Giulietta Masina intro¬
ducing a sequence cut from Nights of Cabiria
about a Santa Claus character known as
‘the man with the sack’ whom Fellini found
in the Colosseum.
(4) Fellini’s reminiscence of his childhood
moviegoing, including a parodistic re¬
creation of a silent movie about ancient
Rome.
(5) Genius, the medium who appears in
Giulietta of the Spirits , conducting a seance
along the Appian Way in an attempt to
communicate with the old Romans.
(6) A tongue-in-cheek journey through the
Roman subways, with a silly ‘professor’ who
is dumbfounded when the subway suddenly
turns into the catacombs.
(7) A visit to Marcello Mastroianni, who
is too busy being lionised by journalists,
fashion photographers, and a busload of
matronly fans to talk with Fellini; a hectic
screen test for Mastorna ; and a brief dis¬
cussion between director and actor about
Fellini’s inhibitions.
(8) A search for old Roman types in a
slaughterhouse.
(9) The audition.
(10) The beginning of shooting on Fellini’s
Satyricon.
The opening sequence, with the camera
making spooky combination tracking and
zooming movements through the field
around a moored airplane and a cardboard
church, invokes the same feeling of death
in the midst of life as the opening tunnel
sequence of SJ. The airplane, winglessly
suspended in scaffolding, bears a marked
resemblance to the rocket of the science-
fiction movie which the director Guido was
unable to ‘get off the ground’ in and
Guido’s entrapment in the automobile is
echoed when we see a black-hatted figure
sitting in the window of the airplane. But
more than a purely psychic stasis is involved
here, for the presence of the hippies—
whose brightly painted car has no wheels—
puts the Mastorna movie into a generalised
context of cultural dissolution.
Fellini's citiema memory: ( A Director's Notebook ’
When Fellini came to make The Satyri¬
con , he said he thought of the three young
central characters as figures out of time,
divorced from history and convention, and
compared them to the hippies of the (then)
present day: ‘They have no illusions about
anything, because they do not believe in
anything, but theirs is a new form of cyni¬
cism, a sort of peaceful disengagement, a
healthy, concrete common sense, a singular
realism.’ What made The Satyricon seem so
healthy next to Fellini’s previous work, and
also so disturbing, was that the young
characters were totally amoral; their utter
liberation, in Fellini’s eyes, is both a myster¬
iously beautiful and a dangerous thing. Ever
the Catholic moralist, he was not content
to end the film on the face of young
Encolpius, as he had originally planned, but
cut from the living face to its frozen image
on a crumbling, ruined fresco mired next
to the sea, a memento mori symbolising the
ultimate failure of any attempt at total
liberation.
The pre-Satyricon hippies in A Director's
Notebook seem to find Fellini in two minds.
On the one hand, he identifies their root¬
lessness and lack of direction with his own
and that of Guido/Mastorna: there is a
shot of a girl sitting silently in the auto-
79
•Never Bet the Devil Your Head *
*A Director's Notebook': Fellini and Mastroianni
‘ The Clowns'
mobile, just like Guido, as the wind blows
and a jet flies into a brilliant setting sun.
But on the other hand, Fellini is exploring
the possibility that these hippies, like his
projected Satyricon characters, might pro¬
vide an alternative to the myths of Western
culture. They are, after all, finding a new
use for his abandoned set, just as their
culture in general attempts to find a new way
of life in the shards of modem civilisation.
A ‘priest’ has just united a couple in
marriage, and another hippie has made art
out of Fellini’s failure—he wanders around
the set reciting a poem contemptuously
entitled ‘Mastorna Blows’. Like them,
Fellini is unable to speculate on the future
(the science-fiction world of Mastorna),
so he decides that the best way of reaching
the future is to return to primitivism . . .
via The Satyricon , which he later described
as a ‘science-fiction film set in the past’.
But Fellini also indicates, as he does in the
ending of The Satyricon , that the rebellious
young may be making a fetish of rebellion,
that they may have no alternative to offer
except a return to zero and a pathetic
defiance whose hollowness is defined in the
childishness of the poem’s title.
The hippies disappear from view, and
Fellini’s images become apocalyptic. The
wind howls, the sky darkens, and snow
begins to fall as we see Mastorna, in the
black cape and hat from SJ, walking from
the airplane with a suitcase and a cello case.
He leaves the cello behind just as Fellini
leaves the film behind. But the director, now
seen walking in a bright vernal landscape,
declares that he will do the film in the future
‘because it is the story I prefer the most’.
He is walking toward what he jocularly calls
‘the Mastorna cemetery’, the warehouse
which contains, among other things, a pile
of rubber heads which were to be used for a
scene in which ‘people kill themselves by
jumping out of a window’. Fellini playfully
pops one of the heads apart, and his script-
girl Marina Boratto (daughter of the mother-
figure Caterina Boratto from Giulietta, who
appears as a depraved matron in the
slaughterhouse episode) gingerly touches it
and squeals with delight. It has all become
rather a silly joke. What remains, he con¬
fides, is 4 a kind of remorse ... as if a million
eyes were staring out at me, waiting.’
Fellini goes from the ruins of Mastorna
to another set of ruins, the Colosseum. But
he realises that the sickness of the modem
world has extended even there, infecting our
view of the past: what he finds in the
Colosseum is a collection of pimps, whores,
transvestites, tramps and cripples, alter¬
nately hiding from his camera and scream¬
ing into it. The tracking shots along the
walls and crevices of the labyrinth seem
to have inspired (or to have been a first
draft of) the opening sewer sequence of The
Satyricon, which is a metaphor for the
decadence of the culture the young heroes
are leaving behind. (Fellini points out that
Petronius visited the Colosseum while pre¬
paring to write his Satyricon, so things
haven’t changed that much.)
In his article on the making of The
Satyricon published in the May 1970
Playboy, Fellini confessed that his research
was very difficult. ‘There existed no models,
no aesthetic canons to copy; each conven¬
tionally expressive perspective was confused,
upset; and if, perchance, I let myself be
tempted by it, the result could be unex¬
pected or catastrophic. The Appian Way?
The ruins of the Colosseum ? Picture post¬
cards. Nothing was coming to me. . . Then
one night, in the Colosseum, I saw that
horrendous lunar catastrophe of stone, that
immense skull devoured by time, as the
testimony of a civilisation with a different
destiny. . .* By thinking of his central
characters as hippies, Fellini was able to
‘regard pagan Rome with eyes unclouded by
the myths and ideologies that have followed
in these 2000 years of Christianity.’ What
gives Fellini his kinship with the hippies
is reflected in the opening shot of the
Colosseum segment, a view of the ruins
through bustling modern traffic, repulsively
overlaid with a red filter. Orson Welles
defined Fellini best when he observed in
1967 that his ‘limitation—which is also the
source of his charm—is that he’s funda¬
mentally very provincial. His films are a
small-town boy’s dream of the big city. His
sophistication works because it’s the creation
of someone who doesn’t have it. But he
shows dangerous signs of being a super¬
lative artist with little to say.’
Welles undoubtedly picked up that last line
from Guido’s declaration that he has
nothing to say, but he is going to say it
anyway. The whole of A Director's Note¬
book is that search for ‘something to say’.
The morbidity of the first two episodes is
dispelled by the introduction of a character
who is both real and a lost fragment of
Fellini’s cinematic past: the ‘man with the
sack’ who brings charity and compassion
into the foul world of the Colosseum and into
the miserable life of Cabiria (who, when the
meeting was to have occurred, had just
been abandoned by a client after leaving the
ghastly ‘procession of Divine Love*).
Fellini has explained that the sequence was
cut from Cabiria because the producer
thought the film was too long; but it seems
appropriate that it was cut so that it can be
resurrected now at a time of renewal.
Fellini returns to his innocent childhood
dreams of wickedness in the cinema memory
which ends with himself, as a little boy in
his father’s arms, staring rapt at the screen
as the camera zooms through the midst of
the crowd. ‘For me,’ Fellini has said, ‘a
movie house is a room bubbling with noises
and odours; chestnuts, the urine of children;
that feeling of the end of the world, of
disaster.’ The orange-tinted film the little
Fellini is watching, like the circus the little
Fellini enters at the beginning of The
Clowns, is a grotesque vision of lechery and
violence which looks merely droll to us but
which is appalling to the child. The film
has unsettling correspondences to the fan¬
tasies of childhood: a grossly fat, baby-faced
Roman is eating grapes out of a woman’s
hand when his mother comes to puli him
away by the ear. Without warning, she
stabs him in the back, and then leers into
the camera with her tongue hanging out in
the patented Fellini image for female lust.
As we stare into the flashing blue lamp
of the projector, we are made to feel the
hypnotic effect the experience is having on
the little boy.
This childlike view of the world’s non¬
sensical wickedness is debased into child¬
ishness in the next three segments (Genius,
the subway, the whores and the truck
drivers), which are on an even lower level
of sophistication than the silent movie
Fellini parodies. This is the Fellini who
would be in control if, as in Never Bet the
Devil Your Head, he couldn’t find ‘some¬
thing to say’. It is reported that Fellini
takes, or used to take, Genius seriously as a
80
medium, but if his appearance here is any
indication (Genius, who looks and acts like
Liberacc, scorns the ancient Romans as
‘very vulgar people’), the director has been
barking up a very wrong tree.
The segment with Mastroianni, who was
to have been Mastoma, is a merciless guying
of his post -Dolce Vita image as a ‘Latin
lover’. It proves Mastroianni to be a
remarkably good sport, and it also allows
him to reciprocate the insult by criticising
Fellini, in an eerily Pirandellian scene, for
not having the ‘faith’ to let him play
Mastoma. Fellini hovers around the edges
of Mastroianni’s adulators with the look of
a man who has created a Frankenstein
monster. It is as if the narcissistic character
he created in 8 { has actually taken possession
of the actor, who, in fact, dons his Guido hat
at one point. Mastroianni wears the same
look of bemused submission as the actor in
Never Bet the Devil Your Head. When the
busload of women pulls up outside his villa,
there is a pan along the row of obscenely
excited old faces; seen through the green
glass of the windows, they look like zombies,
and again we are reminded of the opening
of $£, with Guido suffocating in his auto¬
mobile. Fellini cryptically remarks that
Mastroianni has ‘all the virtues and all the
faults of the ancient Romans’; but this
sequence has less to do with his research
for The Satyricon than with a reminder, lest
he weaken, of the stasis of the Mastoma
period.
In the screen test, we see Mastroianni
idly drawing a bow across Mastoma’s cello,
making a moaning sound, as a horde of
sycophants scurry around preparing him for
the role and the camera tracks aimlessly
back and forth in front of him, conveying a
palpable feeling of tension and imprison¬
ment. ‘When you made La Dolce Vita ,
wasn’t I your character ?’ Mastroianni asks
the director while sitting at a make-up
table. ‘In wasn’t I you?’ Yes, says
Fellini impatiently, but that was in the past.
Mastroianni replies, ‘You are scared,’ adding
that he would become Mastoma if only
Fellini believed that he was Mastoma.
After this we take the plunge into the
frighteningly real world of The Satyricon ,
the camera tracking through the empty
slaughterhouse from the viewpoint of an
animal being led to the cutting tables, with
animal bellowing on the soundtrack. Fellini
is dragging himself kicking and screaming
into his new film.
It is his practice, when preparing a film, to
put an advertisement in the Roman papers
announcing an open audition. As he has
explained: ‘For me, working on a film is a
journey—I’ve said this so often that I hardly
believe it any more. You don’t take a journey
in the abstract, but consider the exigences
that come up from hour to hour, your own
mood, things that are impossible to predict
... you must put yourself in the hands of the
thing that is to be bom ... I call in people;
I have hundreds of faces pass before me.
It’s a kind of ceremony to create an atmo¬
sphere ... I see a hundred in order to get
two for the film; I compare clothing, dia¬
lects, whiskers, tics, postures. Some poor
man may be so happy because I insist on
having him photographed—and the only
thing that interests me is a picture of his
eye-glasses. At a certain point, I’ve had
enough of the office and of the people pass¬
ing in front of me, and then I begin the tests.
This is the definite phase of the ceremony.
At this point, I know that in a short time I
have to begin the film.’ What is needed,
then, is the courage to let the real world
take over and put a definite shape to the
chaotic, ultimately sterile world of the
imagination. Fellini’s audition may seem
chaotic to the casual observer, but to him
this is a process of discovery.
When Fellini/Guido claims that he has
‘nothing to say’, he is actually defining the
role of the artist to be less an arbiter of
reality than a passionate interpreter of reality
(or, to use Fellini’s favourite metaphor, a
ring-master). Leonardo-like, Fellini takes
sustenance from faces and from the physical,
even clinical, detail of the human body. He
will always be a neo-realist at heart, even
when his researches take him into the realm
of the surreal. This is why it is absurd to
take Fellini’s work with too much solem¬
nity; as exaggerated as it may seem, it is
too close to life. And this is why Andrew
Sarris’ characterisation of Fellini as ‘the
Busby Berkeley of metaphysics’ is not as
damning as it might sound.
With uncharacteristic humility, Fellini
avoids showing us his own face during the
audition sequence, although we once see
his hands putting a woman’s photograph into
a filing envelope. We watch the procession
of faces from a vantage point behind his
desk, next to his own chair, as if we were
doing the research with him. His voice
ranges from affection to amusement to con¬
descension to vexation as the people flow
past: a frumpy woman (later to appear as
his ‘script girl’ in The Clowns) reading one
of her poems; a businessman type reading
from a Balkan newspaper; an aging dress¬
maker giving him a youthful pin-up of her¬
self; a sluttish-looking girl asking him, ‘Tell
me what you really think about women—
should I be a virgin or not ?’ (his reply is
tacitly revealed when we realise that she
played one of the whores along the Appian
Way); a man touting his son, who looks
like a pinhead and whistles like a blackbird
‘A Director's Notebook*
(the boy is the ‘sound man’ in The Clowns );
a con-man who tries to sell Fellini a paint¬
ing by ‘an artist greater than Raphael’
whose name, unfortunately, slips his mind;
a balding man who says, ‘If I had a wig, it
would change my whole life,* and gives
Fellini a sample of his hair; a really sluttish-
looking girl who says she played Joan of
Arc, twice, in Sunday school; an effeminate
drama student who gives an hysterical rendi¬
tion of Chekhov; a pretty girl; an exotic
woman who says she dances with trained
snakes (and suddenly appears in a sexy
costume, as if Fellini is daydreaming); and
a fat matron with her two muscle-bound
sons, who strip off their shirts and strike
beefcake poses.
Finally a woman in black with a ravaged
face tells Fellini that his films ‘express
exactly the same thing as my music,’ and
pulls out an accordion. ‘Is it very long ?’ he
asks wearily. As she starts playing her
‘Fortune, Where Art Thou ?’ in the manner
of Nino Rota, the camera zooms all the way
out to make her look small and pathetic
against the wall of the office. Marina
Boratto enters, looks towards Fellini and
stifles a smile. But the camera slowly zooms
in to a large close-up of the woman passion¬
ately belting out the song, and Fellini muses,
‘Yes, I know it must seem sinful, cruel, but
no, I am very fond of all these characters
who are always chasing after me, following
me from one film to another. They are all a
little mad, I know that. They say they need
me, but the truth is that I need them more.
Their human qualities are rich, comic, and
sometimes very moving.*
Under these words, the camera pans
rapidly from face to face of a new group of
characters, with the accordion playing under¬
neath. All of them are talking at once and
smiling, from a monstrously fat bespectacled
man with his arm around his little boy to a
vain curly-haired girl spinning around the
office in a little dance. It is a fresco of human
absurdity and loveliness, and it is all Fellini
has to say. At the end of A Director's Note¬
book, we see him back in action on the set,
brash, jovial, and liberated. ■
81
Neville Hunnings
The first thing to realise when considering the film industry in its relation to the
Common Market is the exceptional position it occupies. Many Community
commentators have referred to it and to the shipbuilding industry as being alike
in that both need special treatment, financial assistance and protection against the
rigours of the competition rules. This now appears also to be the view of the
Commission, although only five or six years ago many senior officials still thought
the film industry would have to stand on its own feet or die. Similarly, more
than one source within the British film industry has expressed the view that it
will not follow the general pattern of other industries when Britain joins the
EEC, but that it will show peculiar characteristics of its own.
As far as the Community is concerned, such an attitude is an example of the
pragmatic leaven which exists deep down under the dogmatic crust, and which
has been seen in the reversal of the Commission’s attitude towards the coal and
steel industries—which are being encouraged to merge and concentrate (now
that they have become weak) instead of being kept separated (as they were
originally when they were strong).
The Community has been feeling its way on the film industry very gingerly
since the early 1960s, and even now has done little more than skim over the
surface. The devising of a full film programme, discussed in academic and trade
meetings in 1961, 1962 and 1968, remains a fairly low priority for the future. An
article on this subject must, then, combine the present with future prognostica¬
tion in a way which is irritatingly familiar to students of British entry into the
Common Market.
A pattern can, however, be discerned in the
writings and discussions and gives a rough
guideline. First, the basic effect of the most
fundamental part of the EEC, the customs
union, is to require the removal of dis¬
crimination as between member states. This
will require the adjustment of certain pro¬
tective measures and, somewhat more subtly,
the application of aid machinery in a way
which does not emphasise nationality.
Secondly, the comparatively weak state of
82
the film industry will require alleviation of
the fairly stern rules against subsidy and
industrial favouritism. The Community has
an anti-lame-duck policy, just like the pre¬
sent British Government; but unlike it, it
does not go so far as to deny the propriety
of aiding the film industry. Nevertheless,
one can expect it to move towards a system
of Community aid, in place of existing
national aids; although, in a parallel area,
member states have shown themselves reluc¬
tant to transfer regional aids to the Com¬
munity authorities. Perhaps there is a very
proper factor working here—the feeling that
aid-granting is a political rather than admini¬
strative act, and that until the Community
acquires a democratic element it is not fit to
handle such political hot potatoes.
The third thread in the pattern is the
‘Defi Americain’, which appears in perhaps
its most powerful form in film affairs. Not
only is it necessary to pull the industry up
by its bootstraps out of financial starvation,
it is also desirable to break the dominance
of American interests in the European film
industries, and particularly in distribution.
This will in the end mean Community
action, and Jean-Claude Batz, in his report
prepared for the 1968 Brussels colloquium,
placed at the centre of his proposal for an
EEC common film policy the establishment
of a strong Community-wide distribution
network.
Paradoxically, the British film industry
anticipates less difficulty from the EEC than
from the policies of the British government,
in particular the near destruction of the
NFFC, the possible abolition of the British
Film Fund, and the effect on international
trade union protection of film workers of the
new Industrial Relations Act. In some
respects, indeed, Britain is moving into the
position of Germany before 1967, before the
latter adopted a policy of aiding the film
industry and when it pursued a lone but
effective opposition to Community assis¬
tance to the cinema. The Commission’s
change of heart occurred just after Ger¬
many’s, and it could be that the new British
attitude will hinder still further the adoption
of a positive Community policy.
Aids
The key to the whole situation is, in fact,
the National Film Finance Corporation—
even more so since the publication last
autumn of its prospectus for a National Film
Finance Consortium and the formation of
the National Film Trustee Company Ltd.
For in many ways, the system followed by
the Corporation hitherto, and the more
sophisticated new arrangements, are pre¬
cisely what the Community has been moving
towards. Did I not know that this was not in
John Terry’s mind at the time, I would have
suspected that he and his colleague, Ian
Smyth, had designed the new arrangements
specifically as a working experiment for a
future EEC system.
The starting point must be the existing
pattern in the six present member countries.
They all impose high admission taxes on
cinemas. They also place the main burden
of their film aid on straight subsidies,
partly to reward artistic success, partly to
reinforce financial success (as with Britain’s
Eady money). Only in Italy and France do
special credit facilities have a role to play.
Writers within the EEC lay some stress on
the undesirably high fiscality of the film
industry and on the difficulty or impossi¬
bility of seriously considering its removal.
They also emphasise the inefficiency of
subsidy systems—as with the Common Agri¬
cultural Policy, the aid money goes to the
successful producers (and entrepreneurs)
while those that need help do not get it.
The palliative adopted so far has been the
linking of some of the aid to artistic ex¬
cellence; but that introduces a bureaucratic
discretion which is not healthy in a general
aid system, although it can quite satis¬
factorily play a minor role. It also opens the
door, and has done, to an indirect form of
censorship of great efficacy.
Even so, the system has the further dis¬
advantage that it in effect subsidises the
film company rather than the film, since the
aid money goes into the company’s coffers
on the basis of its previous films to be used
for setting up its future productions as it
chooses. In practice, the main value of aid
funds in all West European countries, ex¬
cept perhaps Sweden, has been to attract
American money. And the main side effect
has been to encourage co-production arrange¬
ments in order that a film might benefit
from aid granted by each of the co-produ-
cing countries. This effect can be seen partic¬
ularly clearly in Britain, where Eady money
was one of the factors attracting recent and
heavy US investment.
The most thoroughly worked out scheme
to remedy this state of affairs was put for¬
ward by Batz in 1968.* He proposed the
replacement of national subsidies by a
Community film credit bank. Since the key
to a healthy European film industry is dis¬
tribution, it is important to build up one or
more indigenous distribution chains which
may break the American stranglehold. This
would be done by requiring a producer,
when applying for credit from the bank, to
join to his application a ‘European’ distri-
m Contribution d une politique commune de la
cinematographic dans le Marchi Commun
(Brussels, 1968).
butor to whom distribution rights in the
future film had been ceded for the whole of
the Community in return for a minimum
guaranteed return. A ‘European’ distributor
would have to be free from control by or
subordination to non-Community sources of
any kind.
The film bank, which in the early stages
(or, as John Terry has cogently argued,
permanently) might operate nationally rather
than centrally for the whole Community,
would advance funds on the security of
future box-office receipts. And in order to
encourage other sources of finance, more
flexible repayment patterns would be used:
instead of the horizontal ‘layer’ system (first
lender gets all his money back before
second lender gets anything, etc.), the verti¬
cal ‘corridor’ system (lenders recover pari
passu until receipts equal total loans), or a
mixture of the two.
But in order to introduce such ‘revolu¬
tionary’ ideas, there was a major drawback
to be overcome. One of the serious failings
of the French civil code and its derivatives
(including the civil codes of the Six), but
from which English law is free, is that
movable property must be transferred to the
lender if it is to bear a charge or mortgage.
Generally, this creates difficulties for suc¬
cessive lenders; and in the film context,
transfer of the property—either the physical
negative or the notional copyright—can lead
to problems in a film’s exploitation.
To overcome these hurdles, France intro¬
duced in 1944 a National Film Register
(operated by the Centre National de la
Cinematographic) in which most financial
transactions relating to the film are entered.
Entry on the register is conclusive as to
priority, so that a lender who has not entered
his contract cannot subsequently claim
prior rights over a later lender who did
register his loan. The scheme has been suc¬
cessful, and has attracted private finance into
the film industry to a significant degree.
This success, combined with the ideas of
Batz, Claude Degand and others, inspired
the Community to propose its extension to
all the member states (Italy had in fact had
a less comprehensive variant for several
decades) as a necessary preliminary to freedom
of establishment in the field of distribution
services. After several years of preparation
this culminated in a draft directive of the
Commission to the Council of 27th July
1971, which is now passing through the
legislative process (together with the long
awaited draft directive on distribution
services).
The British position on these develop¬
ments is simple. As is not unknown in other
EEC spheres, the Community countries
devote a lot of huffing and puffing to over¬
coming internal structural difficulties so as
to reach a solution which has been operating
happily in Britain for a long time. The
scheme which Batz needed 130 pages to
analyse and argue is in essentials the very
system which has been functioning in
Britain since the NFFC was formed in 1949,
and which has allowed the Corporation, by
recycling its funds, to operate effectively for
22 years on a grand total of just under £3 7
million (excluding the British Lion special
rescue operation)—as compared with Eady
money subsidy amounting to £4-2 million
for 1970 alone.
Not only has the credit bank system been
an intrinsic part of the British film scene,
but the developments introduced during
1971 have to some extent anticipated realisa¬
tion of other aspects of the Batz scheme, in
particular the film register. This has in
practice been kept by the Registrar of
Companies, the charges on a film being
registered under the name of the production
company. Admittedly, English (but not
Scottish) law is in this respect much more
flexible than the Roman law systems of the
Six; but in addition there is a long-standing
habit of entering charges on a register which
goes back at least to the 1870s (the Sale of
Goods Act). The British film industry has
experienced no problems hitherto in secur¬
ing its creditors. Nevertheless, Mme Lucy
Willemetz, in her authoritative survey of
national film registers,f concludes that a
film register would be an improvement on
the companies register in that it would en¬
able loans to be secured on a particular film
rather than on the overall trading of the
production company. The NFFC has
recently gone some way to meeting that
point, and has in effect created what could
well turn into the British National Film
Register when the directive is passed.
As part of its rethinking in 1971, the
Corporation devised a scheme for involving
private investment funds in its work. This
was subsequently semi-sabotaged by the
government through a calling in of the
Corporation’s existing funds, including
future earnings, and their replacement by the
offer of a 25% matching grant from public
funds to a maximum of £1 million for all
future activities. If the new National Film
Finance Consortium gets off the ground,
it will have three features which are particu¬
larly significant in a Community context.
The first of these is the formation of the
National Film Trustee Company Ltd. This
body, through a trust deed, takes over all
the producer’s rights under his distribution
agreement and is given by the producer a
first legal charge on the film for the benefit
of all lenders. The Trustee Co. thenceforth
acts as a central supervisory body on behalf
of the lenders over production and distribu¬
tion of the film, and as a cash distributing
body to the lenders as the receipts come in.
The trust deed contains not only a list of
all documents of title which authenticate the
producer’s rights to produce the film, but
also a list and details of all loans made
towards its financing. The trust deed, there¬
fore, provides the means of balancing the
interests of all lenders between themselves
as well as an extremely flexible means of
sorting out as a whole all the financial ele¬
ments in the production of the film. The
deed is in effect performing the function of
the film register.
The second innovation relates to the re¬
payment pattern, which follows the ‘corridor’
system, with the distributor getting 25%
of the gross receipts throughout the film’s
commercial life and the remaining 75%
being shared rateably between all the in¬
vestors until total receipts amount to 1-8
times the film’s production costs. At that
stage the share for the investors drops to
50% and the remaining 25% goes to the
producer as his profit.
fLes registres publics de la cinematographic
(Lausanne, 1970).
83
The third feature of the scheme prepares
the way for the central condition of the
Batz plan, in that the trust deed requires the
simultaneous conclusion of a distribution
agreement, under the control of the trustees,
which is immediately assigned to the Trustee
Co. No further machinery would be required
for the inclusion of a condition that such a
distributor should be European.
It should be emphasised that the Batz
proposals are private and, although represen¬
ting the most advanced thinking on the
matter (particularly in the Commission),
they have not been officially adopted either
by the Community or by governments or
film industries. Indeed, the instinctive re¬
action of most countries to the problems of
the straight subsidy has been to introduce
qualitative criteria—the ‘clause de medio¬
crity. This is, rather depressingly, the line
being followed by the German film industry,
for instance, in its present discussions for
reform of the film aid law which must be
completely revised by the end of 1972. But
with three major film-producing countries
of the enlarged Community already operat¬
ing special film banks and increasingly em¬
phasising the role of credit provision in their
aid programmes (the Italian film bank was
granted last August an additional sum of
£8J million to be used over the next five
years, over and above its ‘ordinary’ fund of
£3^ million), it can confidently be expected
that this approach will gain ascendancy.
In this it will be helped by the five-year-old
International Committee for Motion Picture
Credit (CICREC), which now includes not
only Spanish and Italian members but also
banking delegates from France, Germany
and Britain (John Terry).
Both the system of direct subsidies and
that of special credit facilities infringe,
strictly speaking, the subsidy provisions of
the Rome Treaty (arts. 92-94). But ‘aid
intended to facilitate the development of
certain economic activities’ (art. 92 (3)(c)) is
permissible, and it is generally agreed now
that the film industry is covered by that
provision.
What is probably not so permitted is the
Eady levy—not because it is a form of aid
but because of the way its funds are ac¬
quired (through a levy on the exhibitor). In
1970 the Court of Justice of the European
Communities (case 47/69) considered a pre¬
cisely similar French scheme of aid to the
textile industry, which was financed through
a tax on the retail sale of certain textile
products, both domestic and foreign, and
held that the Commission was right in
ordering the French government either to
put an end to the whole scheme or to alter
its method of financing (e.g. to a direct sub¬
sidy from public funds). Whether the Com¬
mission takes the same view of the British
Film Fund will depend upon a number of
intangibles, but it is difficult fully to share
the sanguine attitude of the Department of
Trade and Industry on the matter. How¬
ever, the contributory system typified by
Eady is not unknown among the Six, and the
Comite de l’lndustrie Cinematographique
Europeenne (CICE), which groups together
the three branches of the film industry in the
six member states, in fact proposed in 1962
a scheme for ‘autofinancing the film industry’
which amounted to an Eady system writ
large on a unified Community scale.
84
Entertainment Tax
In discussion of possible harmonisation of
film aid systems in the Six, much emphasis
has sometimes been laid on the question of
taxation. All the Six levy admission taxes in
one form or another, but generally these are
now being absorbed into the value added
tax (VAT). Indeed, just after Holland adop¬
ted the VAT cinemas were threatened with
having to pay both entertainment tax and
VAT and had to be given special relief to
avoid such double taxation; the Italians too
in the VAT bill, which has been before
Parliament since February 1971, propose to
add VAT to the existing taxes. There are
also other film taxes, such as the French
distribution tax (tax de sortie). In Britain,
entertainment tax, which was instituted dur¬
ing the Great War in 1916, was abolished
some years ago after an arduous campaign,
and cinema tickets now bear no tax apart
from the Eady levy.
The Community, as a first stage towards
fiscal harmonisation, has required all mem¬
ber states to introduce an added value tax to
replace existing turnover tax systems. Den¬
mark and Norway (and Sweden) have already
introduced the VAT, Eire now has a Bill
before the Dail, and the British Bill is to be
introduced this spring. At present, the indi¬
vidual states have full discretion in operating
the system. But one of its essential character¬
istics is that, as opposed to purchase tax, and
in spite of its name, it applies to the supply
of services as well as the sale of goods. Also,
as opposed to purchase tax, which is applied
selectively as an active instrument of fiscal
policy, VAT is applied as widely as possible
and is fiscally neutral, being solely a revenue
producer. Consequently, in all the existing
member states it is being charged on cinema
admissions (it is also charged on books and
in most of them on the periodical press—in
Sweden it is even charged, at 17*65%, on
second-hand books). In France the VAT
rate for cinemas is 17*6%, with art houses
bearing a reduced rate of 7*5%; cine clubs
are also subject to VAT but have a some¬
what privileged position. Other rates are
6% (Belgium), 9*5% (Holland), 5% (Ger¬
many), 6% (Italy, from 1st July 1972) and
5*26% (Irish Bill). Presumably, on entry
Britain would have the same discretion as
the existing member countries and could
exclude cinema admissions from VAT or
zero-rate them.
The Commission, however, is now em¬
barked on preparations for the next two
stages of fiscal harmonisation: unification of
the tax bases, and then unification of the
actual rates of tax. Proposals for unification
of the tax base are to be submitted to the
Council before the end of 1972; and it is
likely, in view of the existing situation in the
Six, that cinema admissions will be com¬
pulsorily subjected to VAT. Indeed, officials
in the Commission now preparing the
draft have specifically said that this will be
the case. Proposals to harmonise actual tax
rates are due to be presented by the middle
of 1973.
The present UK Government is not likely
to raise any objections to this without a
great deal of prodding, for in the green paper
on the VAT published in March 1971 it is
stated that ‘consumer services such as enter¬
tainment’ would be covered by the proposed
British VAT in any event. This was the
subject of a protesting memorandum sub¬
mitted to the Chancellor of the Exchequer on
23rd July 1971 by Hugh Jenkins MP, on
behalf of 26 representative organisations in
the theatre and cinema industries. The VAT
would be in addition to, and not in substitu¬
tion for, the Eady levy and would in effect
amount to a revival of the old entertainment
tax.
Co-Production
It is well known that co-production arrange¬
ments between France and Italy have been
highly successful, while similar arrangements
between the UK and these two countries
have been a failure. Only three films have
been made under the Anglo-Italian co-pro¬
duction treaty and Joe Janni, producer of
two of them (In Search of Gregory and
Brother Sun, Sister Moon), attributes this
in part to the artificiality of stories and cast¬
ing in order to meet the needs of the co-pro-
duction system and rules. Interestingly, he
does not believe the reason is hostile atti¬
tudes of the British unions.
The precise form to be taken by closer
inter-state co-operation within the new
Common Market is at present quite unclear.
Fears have been expressed that a spread of
the co-production formula will lead to a
Community equivalent of the mid-Atlantic
film, a ‘Riviera’ hybrid. Experience so far
does not entirely bear that out (most of
Resnais’ feature films, for instance, have
been multiple co-productions). To be sure,
some recent Anglo-German television co¬
productions (such as Paul Temple) have
tended towards the ‘Advertisers’ Glossy’,
but that trend was visible before moving to
Germany. Indeed, an Anglo-German co¬
production treaty might make more sense
in cultural terms, to take Janni’s point, than
those with France and Italy—unless we go
back to Dornford Yates.
But as the Community film policy begins
to fill out, there will be less need for co¬
production as an organised form. Its primary
purpose has always been to obtain dual or
multiple nationality for a film and so benefit
from aid money and quota treatment. As
film nationality of a member state gives way
to nationality of the Community as a whole,
intra-Community co-production will become
what the 1st directive calls co-participation,
and the special treaties between member
states will at best lose their raison d'etre, and
at worst become discriminatory in breach of
the Rome Treaty. This process will be
hastened when not only is there full freedom
of establishment, services and capital but
also the‘Societas Europea’or ‘European-type
company’, the proposal for which is now
before the Council, has been adopted. For
then transnational company mergers will
have a simple and convenient procedure, and
some at least of the bigger companies will
probably take advantage of this to create
Community-wide production (and distribu¬
tion) companies. That will not obviate en¬
tirely the need for consortium financing of
individual films, and co-participation deals
obviously have a long future.
Nationality
The redundancy of co-production is directly
linked to the question of nationality, of
eligibility for state benefits which are re¬
stricted to ‘nationals’. It is obviously, there¬
fore, of central importance to determine to
what extent member states may continue to
favour their own national productions and
thereby discriminate against those of other
member states. As Nicholas Ridley said at
a recent meeting, only when national bene¬
fits go will co-production lose its value.
It is not surprising, then, that the rules
on nationality of films, although still in¬
complete, are among the most important of
the Community films legislation. They are
relevant in three contexts: (a) circulation of
films; (£) quota rules; and (c) aids to national
production.
Circulation (ist directive, 15th October
1963): Shorts, actualities and educational
and documentary features have unrestricted
entry into and distribution and exploitation
within member states. Entertainment fea¬
tures, in original version (i.e. undubbed),
having the nationality of one member state
likewise have unrestricted entry and ex¬
ploitation in the others. Thus for such films
customs restrictions and distributors’ quota
are not permitted; exhibitors’ quota is
expressly saved. Special transitional rules
apply to dubbing.
Quota (2nd directive, 13th May 1965):
Import quotas on dubbed films having the
nationality of a member state are also
abolished. Screen quotas may be retained,
or even introduced, but no distinction may
be made between national films and those of
other member states (clause 8 of the new
European Communities Bill deals specifically
with this). Special rules apply to specialised
cinemas but, like the rules on dubbing (and
for the same reason), these do not apply in
Britain.
Nationality (ist and 2nd directives): For
both circulation and quota, the rules as to
nationality of a film are laid down in detail
in the ist directive (arts. 3-4). These criteria
define nationality as a link with a single
member state and there is as yet no attempt
to create a Community nationality for films:
the rules are based on equal treatment of
foreign (i.e. member country) films rather
than on assimilation of all into one category.
This is important, because member states
are still entitled to require the use of their
own nationals in the making of the film.
At the other extreme, the use of non-EEC
citizens in key creative positions is carefully
restricted, and a non-EEC director is only
permitted in exceptional cases. The position
of expatriate film-makers is thus somewhat
insecure; although if they belong to the same
language group (e.g. French-speaking,
English-speaking) they are treated as though
they were a national, and this would seem
to protect the position of people like Joseph
Losey, or even Sam Peckinpah.
Aids (Regulation 1612/68 and 4th directive,
29th September 1970): The position is
different, and simpler, with regard to national
aids to film production, for there the rules
are linked to movement of people rather than
of goods. Thus where a member state makes
the granting of benefits to undertakings
conditional upon a minimum percentage of
national workers being employed (as is the
case under the Eady system), citizens of
other member states are equated with
national workers (which the new bill fails
to do). Likewise, restrictions which result
in discriminatory treatment of foreign (i.e.
other member state) producers are unlawful;
and this is specifically applied to the require¬
ment in French law that a production com¬
pany should be of French nationality if it is
to qualify for French financial aid.
Movement of Labour
Needless to say, a central clement in the
Community rules on the cinema is freedom
of movement of labour. But this appears to
be more important than it actually is, since
in practice there is not a great deal of trans-
frontier movement in this field. It has re¬
cently been said that in Italy practically the
only consequence has been greater mobility
of actors.
Workers on a regular wage or salary basis
have full freedom of movement and must
be treated on the same basis as nationals in
all member countries. This applies not only
to state agencies and legislation but also to
employers and unions. The Commission has
even gone so far as to bring about the with¬
drawal of private social discriminations
against foreign workers in South Germany,
acting as a sort of Race Relations Board,
though on somewhat dubious legal grounds.
The important factor is discrimination, and
so long as that is not present restrictive
labour practices, even a closed shop, will
not be impeded by the freedom of move¬
ment rules. It is perhaps no wonder that a
high union official in London fears more
problems from the new Industrial Relations
Act than from Community rules.
Progress on non-wage-earning labour has
been slower and comes under the heading of
freedom of establishment and freedom to
supply services. The distribution and pro¬
duction branches of the film industry are
now completely covered (or will be when the
6th directive has been enacted); distributors
of one member state cannot, for example, be
prevented from joining the appropriate trade
organisation of another (e.g. the KRS) on
the same basis as nationals, including the
right to stand for office. Rules in Belgium
and Italy requiring film producers to be of
Belgian or Italian nationality have had to be
repealed.
The exhibition branch has hardly been
touched, which is perhaps as well. It is only
cinemas specialising in the exclusive pro¬
jection of foreign films in the original
language which are affected; but this does
not apply where subtitling rather than
dubbing is the normal practice, as in the
applicant countries. A 7th directive is now
being prepared by the Commission to bring
into the net ancillary services such as film
processing.
Censorship
The suggestion has been made, by Catherine
Sieklucka among others,* that film censor¬
ship should also be harmonised, if only
because differing censorship criteria create
distortions of marketing patterns. This
would be unlikely even within the present
Community, with its variation between the
German self-censorship (FSK), the French
municipal plus central censorship, the strict
Italian censorship plus prosecution system,
and the forthcoming partial abolition in
Holland. It would be almost impossible
after the addition of Denmark, which has
abolished adult censorship altogether, and
of Britain, whose system is quite unique and
incompatible with any of the others. The
only type of harmonisation that might be at
all possible would be abolition as regards
adults. The recent French proposals (echoed
in the new Italian censorship bill) put for¬
ward by the Minister of Culture, for a
Quebec-type solution with no censorship for
adults but notification of dubious films to the
prosecuting authorities, constitutes a signifi¬
cant development in that direction. But the
strongly illiberal backlash at present rife in
Britain, and the still severe Irish censorship,
would for the moment neutralise any reform
tendencies from the Latin countries. Nor
should it be ignored that the European
Parliament, in its January 1972 session,
claimed the right not only to discuss the
subject of drugs but also to place co-ordina¬
tion of the fight against psychotropic drugs
firmly in Community hands; during the
debate frequent reference was made to morals
in a way which could easily embrace the
content of films. And the following week
European officials took it upon themselves
to protest against the showing in Brussels
of the Italian film Secret Africa and to pro¬
pose to African diplomats that they should
complain to the Belgian government.
Common Film Policy
The EEC Commission in its memorandum
on the Action Programme for the 2nd Stage
1962-65 said that a common policy would
be adopted for the cinema, comprising con¬
structive solutions at Community level. No
such common policy has yet been adopted,
or even drafted. Nevertheless, the Community
is clearly moving gradually towards a posi¬
tion in which such a policy will begin to be
feasible, and increasing discussion of the
subject can be expected. In particular, the
Commission has included in its detailed
programme for 1972 the continuation of
efforts to harmonise sectoral aid legislation
in the field of cinematography; and M.
Loriot has given as specific subjects for
future action the harmonisation of credits,
creation of a European Film Fund and
the development of a European distributor
network.
The expansion of the EEC is not likely
to raise any particular new problems, since
the applicant countries do not contain any
peculiarities in their film industries (in ex¬
hibition it might be a little different, since
both the British circuit system and the
Norwegian municipally run cinemas are
fairly unique). The applicants have a number
of devices which may be useful to the search
for Community solutions; and similarly they
may have to lose some of them in the in¬
terests of EEC unity. ■
♦In her invaluable book, Les aides d Vindustrie
cinematographique dans la Communaute econo-
tnique europeenne (Paris, 1967).
85
Hi
For several years, Alan J. Pakula was simply a name familiar from the credits
of Robert Mulligan films. Born in 1928, he went to Hollywood, after graduating
at Yale, as assistant to the head of Warner Brothers cartoons. There his stage
work at the Circle Theatre brought a move to M-G-M as an apprentice in pro¬
duction. With Paramount, in 1957, he produced his first film, Robert Mulligan’s
Fear Strikes Out , and continued the association through To Kill a Mockingbird ,
Love With the Proper Stranger , Baby the Rain Must Fa//, Inside Daisy Clover ,
Up the Down Staircase and The Stalking Moon . In 1969, The Sterile Cuckoo
(Rookie in Britain) signalled the arrival of a new director. Last year came Klute,
and the rest, as they say . . .
I never wanted to be a producer. It was
sheer accident, and I was passive about it
for so long it bewilders me. There were a
lot of satisfactions, of course, but I’ve
always wanted to direct, ever since I was
seventeen—and that’s fairly young to feel
a mission, get so close to it, and then avoid
it or seem to avoid it until middle age is
starting to set in.
When I went to Yale and majored in
drama there, I remember directing a one-
act Chekhov farce. I was working with
much older actors—well, they were about
twenty-five or so, veterans back from the
war—and I can still remember the enor¬
mous sense of exaltation. I had never felt
that happy in my entire life. I used to
leave rehearsals and go down the street with
great goat-like leaps, like something from a
Thomas Wolfe novel. It was extraordinary
—I just delighted in working with actors.
I also thought of being a psychoanalyst.
I think because I am basically enormously
curious about people. The difference be¬
tween me then and now is that at that age
I found it much easier to categorise people.
Now, the more I know about them, the
more sense of mystery I feel, and I don’t
have any desire to pigeon-hole people that
way. The curiosity exists for its own sake,
and I think that’s really why I’m a director.
And there’s also. . . I remember at seven¬
teen the feeling that people were finding
things in themselves they could not have
found without me. I was a sort of catalytic
agent, and it gave me an extraordinary . . .
sense of power, I guess you’d say. I suppose
at the age of seventeen I suddenly felt like
a father figure, and it was probably impor¬
tant to me, having had a dominating father.
Besides which it was just pure fun.
At that point I was more interested in
theatre than in films. In the academic
world films were looked down upon a bit.
Quite different from today—I’m on the
other side of a generation gap there. Now
there are times when I almost wish that
films weren’t treated with quite such
reverence. The director as star is a direct
outgrowth of this whole new seriousness
about films, and while it is a marvellously
healthy sign for the cinema and a great
compliment to the director, my concern is
that it can lead to a certain kind of self-
consciousness. It can lead to people with
Left: Donald Sutherland and AlanJ. Pakula.
particular talents and gifts being taken
seriously as intellectuals, when one may have
little to do with the other. It can certainly
encourage directors to a sense of self-
importance that is not unlike the old Holly¬
wood, where you had an image to protect
once you were successful. So many of the
best films were done because someone just
wanted to do them, without worrying
whether it was really important enough.
John Ford, I think, said that the most
important thing is to enjoy it.
You’re getting me at a time when I’m
selecting my next film ... I think finally
that whatever I do is for very personal
reasons. When I did Klute , I did it because
I was attracted to the theme, the chance to
do that kind of melodrama, exploring that
kind of girl, that kind of relationship and
search; but I also knew it would make
certain demands on me in terms of cine¬
matic technique and visual storytelling and
control, which I thought important for me
in my second film as director. I felt that it
ran the risk of looking like a piece of tabloid,
that it could easily turn into a B film. It
was also a film I thought I was strangely
cast for, and all this was part of the attrac¬
tion. The film I’ve just done. The Widower ,
which is not finished yet, is actually one I
started work on before Klute. And again it’s
entirely different. It’s a very tiny film—
when I say tiny, I mean intimate. What¬
ever it is or isn’t, I don’t think it has a
false sense of itself, or tries to be more
important than it is. I think as a director—
and as a spectator—I value a sense of scale
almost as much as anything. Perhaps it’s a
reaction to Hollywood, where scale means
that if you spend more than x amount on a
picture it’s a big picture and it’s got to look
big. I like to make films with a sense of
proportion, the size that belongs to the
subject, and that’s something you have
inside your head.
I started out on Klute feeling that it
couldn’t be more different from The Sterile
Cuckoo, which deals with a much more
innocent world in terms of style and every¬
thing, and this was one of the reasons for
doing it. But halfway through I suddenly
realised—much to my surprise because I
consider myself a fairly rational fellow about
what I do—that in both films I was dealing
with a rather repressed male who seems
organised and orderly, who becomes in¬
volved with a compulsive but enormously
alive girl who acts out all of her neuroses,
is exciting, has a certain kind of wit and
hysterical freedom that he is incapable of,
and who lights up his world and almost
pulls him into her self-destruction. Now,
Pookie Adams and Bree Daniels are very
different ladies, and certainly Jerry Payne
and John Klute are very different, but there
is a kmd of essence in them that is alike.
By Indirections. . .
I hadn’t really thought about the elliptical
approach you mention as common to both
films, but it’s true. I am oblique, I think
that has to do with my own nature. I like
trying to do things which work on many
levels, because I think it is terribly impor¬
tant to give an audience a lot of things they
may not get as well as those they will, so
that finally the film does take on a texture
and is not just simplistic communication.
For instance, the reason for that first scene
in Klute —the family gathering—is that we
are going into a world where families do not
exist, an underside of people without roots
that seems to exist divorced from the whole
middle class society. I guess that’s kind of
Hitchcock—where do you start that is
going to be the opposite? And for me the
opposite was to start with families and
Thanksgiving and people who belong to¬
gether. It is also the only sunny scene in the
film. Everything is simple. Then you cut
to the same tableau in darkness with the
empty chair. I wanted it to look almost
posed, like family pictures, romanticised as
you like to remember family celebrations.
People against that glass wall, against sun¬
light and all that foliage, like a group of
warm plants in the sun; then the darkness,
and you go into a world where people are
enclosed. . .
Then later, when Bree Daniels sings that
little hymn in her room . . . that was not
planned by the way, it was Jane Fonda
relaxing between takes. Wc had tried
several things for that scene and I wasn’t
happy with any of them. They were re¬
loading the camera, and she was sitting there
smoking, off in her own world, and I sud¬
denly heard her singing that hymn. I
whirled round, and she looked at me and
stopped. ‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘you want me
to use that!’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s it, that’s
what we’ve been looking for.’ It’s one of
my favourite things in the film because it’s
the moment when you really feel her vul¬
nerability. The panic comes after, on the
telephone; here it’s a much more ordinary
kind of vulnerability. Which interested me.
Because when you have a girl who is psy¬
chologically disturbed, and you put her into
this kind of melodramatic situation which is
a perfect reason to be in a state of terror,
then finding those moments when you sec
what that girl could be underneath, finding
unhysterical, seemingly relaxed moments,
is the hardest thing to do, and the most
important for me. I’m not very interested
in characters who come in at the top of
their peak emotionally and stay there; but
when I can sense that . . . sometimes almost
89
a sleepy part of them . . . then, ah! they
exist outside the story.
Several people wanted me to cut that
scene, saying I didn’t need it. And from a
storytelling point of view, indeed, the story
would have played, nothing would have
been lost, except the character. But there
was something else. That hymn she sings
is one most Americans sing at Thanksgiving
time in grade school—middle class American
kids—and it represents a whole kind of
middle class upbringing. When Jane asked
me why I wanted her to do it, I didn’t
really know. I just knew it was one of the
great moments for me. But it not only
linked with the opening shot, it was also
right for Bree. Because her family is never
discussed, where she came from. I did have
stuff in the scenes with the psychiatrist
where she revealed more about her back¬
ground, but I didn’t use it because I thought,
oh boy, it’s going to become a twopenny
analysis. But there, in the midst of all this—
you’ve just seen her pick up a trick, you’ve
heard people talking about her bizarre way
of life—there’s this unexplained thing which
is almost like a past life. It’s like Bridie
Murphy, something coming out of that girl
which has nothing to do with prostitution,
nothing to do with her present life, it comes
out totally unconsciously when she’s smok¬
ing pot.
In The Sterile Cuckoo I wanted to sug¬
gest, not too directly, that Pookie Adams
was a girl who belongs nowhere. In the script
originally there was a whole sequence on
her campus, but now you never see her
college. You see her in boarding-houses, in
buses, in his college, always coming and
going. The only world of hers you see is the
cemetery, some place where she goes to
fantasise by herself and where she takes
Jerry after the disastrous visit to the bar.
Even the scene with her father adds to
that because they never say a word to each
other. The most dangerous thing about the
film is that it almost misleads the audience.
Because the whole of the first part, with the
exception of the prologue and a few inter¬
spersed moments, is done in the rhythms of
comedy. So when you get halfway through
with the scene where they go to bed to¬
gether, the audience thinks well, this is
obviously a fun film. A tender comedy, I
guess Hollywood would call it! But then it
changes: it becomes a sad little story of
first love and first failure, of the people who
survive and those who don’t. There are
still funny things but it slows down—
deliberately—it slows down, it slows down,
and then it just stops.
Now if the affair had ended melodramati¬
cally, if she’d really been pregnant and gone
for an abortion, then a theatrical kind of
thing could have taken over the comedy.
But it wasn’t that: the reality of that kind
of affair for me was . . . something com¬
pletely unformed, it died, and there was
nothing left. Originally there was a scene
which Alvin Sargent had written—and
which, to his credit, I liked more than he
did. It was a big, bravura scene to which
everything was leading, and I shot it but
never used it because it violated everything
Right: Faces of the murderer in * Klute*. Cable
{Charles Cioffi ) in his office , watching Bree , and
in the deserted garment factory. Below: Breeds
apartment , with Kennedy poster and bare brick¬
work.
we were doing with that film.
The scene is the one where Pookie comes
back to the boarding-house, and Jerry
realises she must be there and goes in. In
the film now she breaks down, he stays the
night, and then just takes her back on the
bus and that’s it. In the script, and what we
shot, there is a dissolve; it’s the middle of
the night. He wakes up to find her gone.
He looks around, there’s an empty bottle
of sleeping-pills on the dresser. He panics
and there’s a hysterical scene which ends
with her smiling and saying, ‘April fool,
Jerry!’ She opens her hand and there are all
the pills. And suddenly this gentle boy
starts to hit her and breaks down sobbing,
and she says, ‘OK Jerry, uncleV She knows
she’s destroying him and doesn’t want to
go on. It was a good scene, but it was too
big for the picture; it brought it smashing
up to a Kazan kind of climax (no disrespect
intended) instead of just dying away. Once
he doesn’t love her any more, it’s as though
he has no right to express his anger. And
the scene where he finally tells her he wants
to leave her is one of my favourite moments
in the film because she doesn’t do anything,
she just has her hand over her mouth and
she looks at him, says nothing, and drives
away.
We’re back again, in a sense, with the
scale thing, because I wanted The Sterile
Cuckoo to have, again without stating it, a
sense of looking back. The montage bits
you don’t like are part of that, an attempt
at a kind of scene from memory. But I
suppose they are Lelouchy; I feel the film
gets unspecific and generally sentimental in
those areas. Originally the script told the
story in flashback with voice over, but I
never shot that. It was based on a first novel
by a young man just out of college and
reminiscing about it, and I was trying to
capture that sense of looking back. I would
never have tried anything like the lyrical
montage after the motel scene if I’d had
two obviously film-romantic characters like
Anouk Aim6e and Trintignant. With this
boy and girl in this romantic situation, I
felt I could get away with it. But I forced it,
perhaps. At my best I’m oblique, at my
worst it slams in!
On the other hand, the ending, the bus,
that scene with the car, all that works for
me; it is clouded with memory. And that
motel with the funny little church next to
it. . . it’s almost like land’s end, a place
made up by Pookie Adams. It’s a world that
boy would never find again. I don’t know if
you realise it but you never see a city in
that movie ... I didn’t want to show any
place that boy was going to go when he was
an adult. In Klute , on the other hand, once
you get into the city, you never see anything
but the sense of being trapped in it.
A World Off Balance
I guess I’m attracted to a certain kind of
limitation in the canvas, to films that take
place in a limited world. With Klute , I cut
off many of the compositions, reaching
after very nervous compositions with Gor¬
don Willis, the cameraman. On our first
meeting I said to him, ‘One of the biggest
problems of this film is going to be that we
are using Panavision, and I don’t want any
open space. I want a sense of verticals. I
want a sense of being off balance, people
90
on the edge of the room, people constricted.’
For Bree’s apartment, George Jenkins
originally designed three little rooms. I
said let’s yank all that and just have a tunnel:
I wanted her at the end of a tunnel. I also
wanted it unfinished. Because you’re getting
her at a transitional period: she’s halfway in
and halfway out, she’s nowhere. It’s not the
apartment she would have had two years
ago when she was fully committed to the
callgirl life. Nor is it the other ... I mean,
if she designed the apartment she’d like to
have, it probably wouldn’t be like this and
it probably wouldn’t reflect her at all. This
flat is not a cosy home, and one of the strange
things about it for me is that, here’s a girl,
she’s very frightened, and yet she’s in a
rooftop apartment. There’s a sort of am¬
bivalence about the danger. Part of her
walks right into it, is attracted to it, and the
other part protects herself with five locks
on the door. Part of her is trying to make it
a home, but the other part is saying oh,
I’ll never finish it.
Again there were throwaway ideas in that.
The fact that there was a patch of exposed
brickwork. Stylish young New Yorkers will
tear out the walls and go to the natural
brick, because it’s handsome. Obviously she
started. She clearly has taste, and every¬
thing she has in there, in its own funny way,
has a kind of taste. But nothing quite goes
together, nothing is finished. The idea of the
shawl put up over the bed as a canopy was
Jane’s ... I’m not interested in puppets, I
encourage actors like mad because I want
their ideas and I can use them. She also
wanted to live in that set and she did, in the
studio up in Harlem, for three nights I
think. I had her order all the books to help
her find the character, and she put up the
John F. Kennedy picture because I intro¬
duced her to some callgirls and they all had
one. She also ordered all the food in that
ice-box, mostly health-foods. Again this is
mostly throwaway, but these girls can be
mainlining, and there they are saying, ‘Yeah,
but you got any wheat-germ? I don’t eat
those non-organic foods.’ There are these
rather comic attempts to take care of them¬
selves and bring a certain order into their
lives.
Anyway, I wanted that sense of walls, of
being able to pull back and have that girl
trapped at the end of a tunnel, the sense of
being locked in. When I first showed the
film at the studio, one of the executives, a
rather bright man, said, ‘Well, the trouble
with the film, Alan, is that it’s claustrophobic.
You’ve got to get some more wide-angle
shots, you’ve got to let the audience breathe
a little.* And I said no. ‘I know this is not a
cheap picture, but you’re not going to get
the whole screen for your money.’
Even that garment place we found—it’s
a real location—has an unusually low ceiling
and it’s very, very long. Again that was
terribly important, although I wanted a
quite different effect there. In a curious
way, that setting for me was very romantic...
the old patches of cloth and the sewing-
machines, all kind of silhouetted. It turns
into terror at the end, but it starts out as a
strange sort of romance in there. So much
of the film up to that point is shot in a very
cold way. Even, for example, the scene
where she picks up the first trick. We shot
that in a real hotel room. We could have
built a set, but I wanted to get a sense of
being forced into not having angles, of
being forced to do a sort of cinema-veritd
photography. Well, to go from that kind of
cold reality to that dress place, even going
up in that elevator to begin with—which
becomes terrifying at the end—is rather a
funny, eccentric thing, and it’s almost like
being pulled into a story-book world. In
the original screenplay by Andy and David
Lewis that scene was there, but the de¬
nouement took place in her apartment. The
denouement was also quite different because
there were no tape-recordings, no recording
of the murder. But there was that scene
where she went and undressed for that old
man; and that’s when I thought, ‘I’m going
to do this film.’
Jane asked me why I was so interested by
that scene, and it’s because it shows what
essentially should be a totally corrupt sexual
act, and yet it’s in many ways the most
romantic, innocent scene in the film. And
that kind of contrast, that kind of paradox,
interests me. I have a hunch that of all her
clients, the old man might be the only one
she deeply enjoyed. Ego-satisfaction, ego-
reassurance. For a girl who undoubtedly
had no fantasy life with her father—it’s
never said, but I’m sure hers is not a child¬
hood with bedtime stories—this is about as
close as you come to it. It’s like a little girl
playing at dressing-up, and there is a
strange kind of story-book satisfaction.
There was an attempt to extend the picture
stylistically in that scene. For her entrance,
there was that move down from his point
of view, then a panning shot with her in¬
side; and then another move down and she
comes into this rather lush close-up. Very
early on in the picture I said to Gordon
Willis, ‘That entrance should be just like
Von Sternberg photographing Dietrich.*
The whole concept was misty and oozing
rhythm, and then the almost liquid close-
up. I thought the music was particularly
successful there . . . something Michael
Small has never really been given credit for.
The music there has a deep sensuality and
yet a story-book quality. It created an
atmosphere in which romanticism did not
seem out of place. That scene, you know,
was shot with rats running around the floor.
We had the place for the Jewish holidays—it
was the only time we could get it.
Disturbing the Scale
You mentioned the scene with the models
at the beginning. Originally the script had
a scene in which Bree talked, and you saw
the TV commercial she was trying out for.
Well, you just can’t satirise TV commercials
any more, so I did this scene instead. I
said to Jane, ‘I want to surround you with
the most beautiful models I can get and put
the prettiest next to you. I want the intro¬
duction to be as if you were just part of the
chorus.’ What I wanted was a sense of total
anonymity. And they go right past her, all
they say is ‘Funny hands!’ That was im¬
provised—I didn’t tell the actors what point
I wanted to make. When I told Jane this
was her entrance in the picture, she said,
‘That’s terrific. Because otherwise people
would say, oh, Jane Fonda, what problems
has she got, it’s easy for her.’
In contrast to that total anonymity, that
sense of being nothing to these people, Bree
is a star, she’s Greta Garbo, she’s Marlene
Dietrich, she’s all of it to that old man. As
one of the callgirls I talked to said to me,
‘For half-an-hour I am the only thing that
matters, I’m attractive to him, and oh, that
sense of being wantedV And there Bree is
with that moment, she’s a goddess. That
scene with the models was also an attempt
to play with scale, disturbing the scale in the
picture. The first time you move from that
quiet little house and garden in the prologue
is to an image of what is supposed to be:
those three enormous photographs, much
bigger than the girls lined up like soldiers
on those little white chairs. It was also an
artificial composition, taken flat on, an
attempt to show a certain kind of pretension
in that world, where image and reality are
'Klute': Jane Fonda. 1 ... I want to surround you with the most beautiful models / can get. / want the
introduction to be as if you were part of the chorus .’
91
totally contrasted. I mean, those girls are
tiny but the fantasy they’re reaching for is
enormous. Probably nobody ever gets it;
but there are so many things that have been
said and said and said, and unless in some
way you give the audience a sense of them
without their realising it . . .
It’s rather the same with the murderer,
Cable, in his office, or the scene with the
casting director. In a sense all those offices
and business places you see represent an
attempt to be something more important than
the person is, to make the person seem more
important, and have little to do with any
kind of reality in him. Finally, all these
people are playing at being a television
producer or whatever . . . and it’s as though
Bree were a kind of passive target for their
egos. She’s just something for them to play
against, really; they’re like old-fashioned
star actors busy showing how marvellous
they are. So it’s something of that need to
come back and say I AM, goddammit I am,
I am important, that drives her on. It’s her
way of hanging on to reality, compulsive
though it may be. Then when she goes to her
client in the hotel room, in a curious way
this faked up act of sex has at least a reality
of emotion from the man, and in a way that’s
something to hold on to.
A lot of thrillers deal with the victim
living in a nice safe world and suddenly the
terrible menace enters, turning it into a
nightmare. Well, that has nothing to do with
Klute, because this girl is trapped between
two enormous threats. She is endangered by
herself, by her own life, and she is endangered
by the melodramatic bit. The tape record¬
ings were an attempt to synthesise these
two elements, to suggest that Bree Daniels
really almost destroys herself. The irony is
that just as she is beginning to deal with
her own problem, she is almost destroyed
by a relic from her past.
The tape-recorder really came out of the
fact that the end of the screenplay just had
a man who came up to her apartment,
started pouring out his life, and wound up
by shooting himself. I was looking for a
climax that had something more specific
to the story . . . something more surpris¬
ing, too. The idea of her hearing a friend’s
murder seemed more terrifying in its
sadism. This man who records a murder
he has committed is a man cut off from
his own emotions and he plays back the
tape, trying to feel something. It’s the
final act of masturbation. He’s very often
shot through glass or against windows, a
man isolated, dead, in the black and white
world of his office. For me, a more essential
truth than all the wild, uncontrolled passions
in a sadist was the deadness, the feeling of
something missing, of even perverse orgasms
coming second-hand. The irony of a man
who is a scientist, obviously involved in
aeronautics and the moon thing and who
can deal with all that, but is himself cut off
from the most simple human behaviour.
The other thing that fascinated me about
the tape-recordings was that from the very
beginning her voice is weaving the web that
is destroying her. You never hear the killer
saying T am going to destroy that girl’ or
whatever; you just sec that obsessed man
going from murder to murder and listening
to that seductive voice, that siren song
calling him. So she becomes, up to a point,
her own killer.
The Compulsions of Klute
Klute really deals with compulsive behaviour,
and that’s an area of John Klute we get into
that is not totally developed, and it should
be. Certainly the thing that you got* came
out of Donald Sutherland in the part, and
I’m interested that you got it. It was not
deliberate, and yet there is a complication
in the man that was not designed. What
Donald gave it was a kind of complication
underneath, a cut through the straightness
of the character so that there was something
else in that man. Now, I discussed a whole
subplot about John Klute with the writer
in which he represented the kind of small¬
town American that Spiro Agnew talks
about: a man who embodies the puritanical
protestant virtues, who believes that we
control our destinies, is enormously honest,
rigid in his code of moral behaviour, and
condemning of people who do not live up
to it.
This man, who obviously is repressed
anyway, is forced in trying to find his mis¬
sing friend into a whole world of compulsive
behaviour. It’s everything he despises and
he feels attracted to it. In a way there was
an area where he is almost crushed by it
because he falls in love with her, and an
examination of the why of what it releases.
We discussed doing all of this in the film,
but when we went into it the film began to
lose a spine, something simple in the midst
of all this convoluted story-telling that
could pull the audience through it. So I
rejected it. But somewhere or other it
should be inherent; somewhere or other I
felt there was something of the tortured
puritan. And certainly Donald gave the
sub-text of obsession at times, which I
think makes the character more memorable
than if it had been played by someone more
simplistic.
The ending, too, is very tentative: the
last line is ‘You may see me tomorrow.’ I
think there is certainly no better than a
50-50 chance of Bree making it with a
straight life . . . and I think a good deal less
than that of her making it with Klute. The
screenwriter would not have agreed with me:
he had a happy ending. And Warner Brothers
wanted the happy ending, but I didn’t shoot
it. What I love about that ending—which
was improvised, the phone call ... I didn’t
tell her how to react—is that it’s done with
humour but for a moment she’s attracted,
it’s still there. Part of her is going to miss
the old compulsions; they’re kind of cosy no
matter how destructive they are. But one
could do another film and tell exactly the
same story from the point of view of the
man. Because he has got to a certain age in
life, and when a friend whom he admires
seems to have changed the whole pattern of
his behaviour, he’s almost looking to find
out how that can happen, what there is in
me that can make it happen again. There is
that kind of search in the film, but there was
no time to develop it.
I’ve been accused of being more interested
in women’s behaviour than men’s, but after
all this is only my second film. But I do
relate to women. Let me tell you something
*‘[The killer] then dies as Klute makes the
traditional cavalry charge to the rescue, and
Bree is safe again ... or has John Klute taken
his place?* sight and sound, Autumn 1971.
that John Nichols, the novelist of The
Sterile Cuckoo , said to me when I first met
him. The book was written when he was a
year out of college and is obviously very
autobiographical, and when we went on
location to the college everybody said this
girl or that girl was Pookie Adams. What he
said was, ‘Well, there were a lot of Pookie
Adamses . . . but the reality, which I rea¬
lised when I was halfway through the novel,
is that I was Jerry Payne and I was Pookie
Adams. Jerry was the stable, organised side
of me that allowed me to function; and
Pookie was the self-destructive, gifted part
of me. Both surprised me and they’re both
me.’ The same applies to me: I think I’m
Klute, and I think I’m Bree Daniels at some
points. I think I’m a man of great will, and
also a man disturbed by compulsive be¬
haviour, someone surprised that at my age—
43—he’s divorced. I did Klute at a very
specific time in my personal life, and I was
interested in that kind of ambivalence in a
woman. Bree Daniels’ problem, in a way,
is the confusion of sexual roles; the paradox
of the seemingly totally attractive woman
who needs constant reassurance of her
sexuality, and who also finds ways of using
sexuality to deny sexuality by proving that
she can make a man feel without feeling
herself, that she is therefore stronger than
the man.
The scene in the market, where Klute is
buying fruit and Bree is just watching him,
loving him, surprised that she can love
anybody, is if you like a kind of sexual
reversal. First of all, Klute is a man who
would buy fruit carefully and would know
how, whereas Bree, for all that she’s sup¬
posed to be . . . well, who is very feminine—
doesn’t know how to act like a woman, as
a lot of prostitutes don’t. If I’d had a chance
I’d have shown Bree shopping earlier in
the film, rushing through it, taking no care.
Here is this girl, and the man has to teach
her how to be a woman. It’s like he’s the
father of a naughty child—when she steals
the fruit—and he has to teach her not only
how to be a woman, but also that the simplest
action in life deserves care, a kind of pride
and joy and feeling in it. They were both
marvellous in that scene ... I originally
had dialogue there but they wanted to try
something without, and I said OK.
Areas of the film are improvised. For
instance, the scenes with the psychiatrist.
Psychiatrist scenes per se are such a cliche
in films—they remind me of courtroom
scenes, it’s like nothing real ever happens
there. The only justification is if you really
feel a sense of self-discovery. If that doesn’t
happen—and it’s an acting problem—then
you can’t do it. And it was very difficult.
It was difficult because Jane was very true
to character, and Bree Daniels is not a girl
who is going to break down easily. Vivian
Nathan, the actress playing the psychiatrist,
was never introduced to Jane; she was
installed at her desk, and when she was
ready and the camera was ready, Jane came
into the ante-rcom, and when I said ‘Action!’
she walked into the office for her appoint¬
ment. And they talked. At the end of each
take, I would talk to them separately so they
never met off-set. And then it got com¬
plicated and it got kind of boring.
What happened was that we would have
session after session, and Jane would talk
about her problems, but she never said she
92
was a callgirl. I suppose we got to about the
seventh or eighth session. Then Vivian
said, ‘I keep trying and trying to get her to
say she’s a callgirl and she won't say it. I’m
not going to force her because I’m not sup¬
posed to know.’ I went to Jane and she said,
‘I keep trying to tell her, but every time I
start getting to it she changes the subject.
She doesn’t want to hear.’ This went on all
day and everyone was getting pretty bored.
But Jane was always in character. And then
I got to a point where I felt I had to break
her out of it, so as to get something exposed.
So I told Vivian, ‘You’ve got to be less
understanding now. I want you to really
go at her. Slam her for all those half-truths.’
Jane came in and Vivian started slamming
her. And Jane got very cool, cooler than
before, more poised, more relaxed, just the
opposite of what I wanted. I was really sort
of heartbroken, because it was about four
o’clock and I thought we weren’t going to
get it. So at the end of the take I went to
Jane and said, ‘Gee, Jane, she really went
for you. How come you weren't more upset ?’
She said, ‘Overt hostility is the easiest thing
in the world for Bree Daniels to deal with.
She deals with that every day of her life.
It makes her relax because then she knows
where she’s at.’ She was so right! I went to
Vivian and told her to forget what I’d said,
it was a bad direction. This time I told Jane
Donald Sutherland as Klute
that on her way to the psychiatrist’s office
she saw a phone booth, that the compulsion
to pick up a trick was as strong as ever, so
she’d decided to quit analysis. That’s all I
told her.
She went into the office, sat down, got
through all the how-are-you nonsense, then
said, ‘I can’t come any more’—‘Why?’—
‘Well, I can’t afford it.’ She told about the
phone booth and wanting a trick, and they
talked a bit, and Vivian said, ‘Do you feel
I’ve failed you?’ There was a pause, then
Jane said, ‘No, I feel I’ve failed you.’ All
this time Bree had been saying how much
she hated people. And Vivian did some¬
thing—if she’d told me she was going to
I’d have killed her—she suddenly dabbed
her eyes. Jane looked at her and asked why
she was crying. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘all this time
you’ve been telling me how you hate every¬
body, and you’ve just said a very nice thing
about me . . . Now that you’re going to
leave me, what are you going to doT Jane
burst into tears and everything came pour¬
ing out, ninety per cent of what I have in
the film, and she said, ‘You know what it
is? I’m beginning to feel. And I’m just so
scared.’ It came out, the voice was shaking,
it was happening, and my back went like
that ! . .. There was no way of directing that,
everything pouring out . . . and then we ran
out of film. Nobody talked. We just re¬
loaded and went on.
I don’t understand anyone who says he
just wants puppets: you must listen to an
actor’s instincts and give them considera¬
tion. But although areas of Klute were
improvised within the form of a scene, and
the script changed in terms of words and
even scenes, it was the writer’s idea to deal
with that kind of girl and that kind of
relationship in the form of a search. I fell
that certain things in the script didn’t
work ... for me; too much was overt,
verbalised. Finally there was a point when
I really felt I had to go out on my own.
And then in the course of the filming, things
like the tape-recorder and the improvisa¬
tion with the psychiatrist . . . there were
many things like that. But if Andy Lewis—he
and his brother have screen credit but it
was Andy I worked with—had not been
fascinated enough by that kind of sexual
ambiguity and that kind of compulsion and
decided to try to do it within a thriller
form, there would be no film, and I would
not have directed Klute.
The Widower
My new film is from a screenplay by Alvin
Sargent, who did the screenplay for The
Sterile Cuckoo. Both Klute and The Sterile
Cuckoo dealt with one repressed person and
one who was busy acting everything out.
The Widower deals with two people who are
totally repressed. And in every other way,
except their withdrawal from passion and
from exposure to hurt, they are entirely
different. She’s an English spinster, really
more Victorian than anything, a woman of
immense will, enormous discipline. He’s a
boy, an American boy, who seems to have
been filleted, boned out. He seems to have
no sense of himself, he refuses to compete.
And it deals with their metamorphosis
together. It’s a love story of the absurd.
They’re outrageously mismatched; but
somewhere, underneath all of the surface
mismating, there is something only each
one could have done for the other.
There is a shot early on in the film, a shot
that must last, oh, I guess over a minute and
a half. . . and it’s just a pan down rows of
books. It starts at the top and keeps going
down these endless academic rows, and over
it you hear a man talking into a tape-
recorder, the boy’s father, obviously pre¬
paring a speech for some august body,
abstractions that would go with these books,
and the camera just keeps going down, one
case of books after the other, more books
and more books and then at the very bottom,
like at the bottom of a well, there is this boy,
and the father’s voice just goes on and on
and then says, ‘Well, Walter, how are
you ?’
And that’s the boy. He’s all secret and
inside. And then he’s sent to Spain because
he spends all summer in movie houses, just
sits there in strange passivity, and the
father’s not quite sure there isn’t something
wrong with him. Then his involvement with
this enormously precise lady who protects
herself in a different way. They’re absurd
together, ludicrous . . . but essentially it’s an
outrageous little love story. In a curious way,
of course, all three of my films have in
common that they have ludicrous lovers.
There’s not a Garbo or a Gilbert in the
bunch. ■
93
• --- 238 $. —
James Paul Gay
RED MEMBRANES.RED BANNERS
It has been nearly a decade since Bo Widerberg first nailed the charge of ‘social
irrelevance’ on Ingmar Bergman’s door, and the subsequent period has been one
of increasing polarisation within Swedish film life. At its simplest, this division
could be defined as the conflict between Bergman’s psychological expressionism
and the attempt by nearly all the young Swedish film-makers to forge an artisti¬
cally viable Socialist Realism. The tensions, however, lie much deeper than the
mere formulation of conflicting ideologies, and extend instead to all levels of
film production. On one point only has there been unanimous agreement: the
prognosis for the future of Swedish film is deeply pessimistic.
To a great degree this pessimism is rooted
in the current economic crisis. Television
was introduced only in 1955 (colour broad¬
casting began in 1970), but its impact was
greater than all predictions: today more
than 85 per cent of all Swedish homes have
a television set, and the decline in cinema
attendance is still continuing unabated.
Production costs, of course, have sky¬
rocketed, and the proclivity toward experi¬
ment and innovation has been replaced by
caution and an agonised mulling over box-
office receipts. The decline in revenue has
not only decreased the venture capital at
Svensk Filmindustri and Sandrews, but
even more important, it has limited the
potential of the Swedish Film Institute. At
the moment, the Film Institute’s sole source
of income is a 10 per cent tariff on cinema
tickets. This gives it an annual budget of
£1.2 million (1970) of which around £80,000
is allocated toward new film production. In
spite of the drastic rise in ticket prices, the
financial position of the Institute is more
precarious today than at any time since its
creation in 1963. Shooting in bad weather
has long been a necessity in Sweden, and
the cold winds from the balance sheets make
spring seem very far off indeed.
The success not only of Bo Widerberg,
but also of a sizeable group of young directors
who have followed in his wake—Stellan
Olsson (It's Up to You), Roy Andersson
(A Swedish Love Story), Lars Forsberg
{The Yankee) and Lasse Forsberg {The
Assault) —has created an image of a growing
politisation of film. These film-makers are,
of course, of widely differing temperaments
and talents; they are listed together only
because each of them has in some way con¬
tributed to this image. The way in which
film has become ‘politicised’, and what that
term has come to mean, should be carefully
examined and an assessment should be made
to determine how much of a liberating force
the politicised film has been.
The preoccupation with politicising art
has been both international and cross-
cultural, affecting theatre, music and the
plastic arts as much as film. The events of
the past decade, both technological and
political, which have brought this con¬
sciousness to such prominence have been
well documented and need not be repeated
here. The results are clear: not only have
many more films (and plays, and paintings
and songs) taken an overtly political theme,
but the restrictions which had previously
limited the treatment have come under
heavy questioning. The most visible of these
is of course censorship, which has signifi¬
cantly relaxed its grip (although it is far
from dead: Ken Russell’s The Devils has
been banned in Sweden*). But one has only
Left: Bergman*s ‘ Whisperitigs and Cries*, with Liv
Ullmann {above) and Ingrid Thulin {near left,
with Bergman and Liv Ullmann).
to remember that Potemkin could not be
shown in this country until 1952 to feel
grateful for the progress that has been made.
Of more importance than the purely nega¬
tive restrictions of censorship, however, are
the implicit, often subconscious limitations
that result from the way a film is distributed,
produced and written. It is precisely these
considerations which were to be such a
liberating force.
These explorations led to the realisation
that film production could be transformed
in three ways: political themes could be
made the explicit content of a movie, films
could be shown outside normal cinemas, and
the audience could be transformed from
passive spectators to engaged participants.
Each of these three developments could be
revolutionary in the true sense: replacing
one consciousness with another, transform¬
ing the self-evident into the archaic. The
results would be that film viewing could be
made a part of everyone’s working-day life,
an appendage of the factory instead of its
antithesis. Politics would be not only war,
money, imperialism, ideology and colonial¬
ism, but also education, sex, marriage, food,
psychology and even sleep. The auteur
would be de-mythologised, and film would
be transformed from a closed, authoritarian
statement to a mutual exploration of a uni¬
versal sensibility. Audiences would actively
respond (often by making films of their own)
until the distinction between artist and
spectator would be defined in new ways, and
finally obliterated entirely.
What should be noted is not the extent
to which this transformation has failed, but
the degree of its success, which is remark¬
able. This film aesthetic has made brilliant
and impressive strides—in Argentina, Brazil,
Cuba and a few other semi-developed
countries. Interestingly, it has not taken
root either in the advanced industrial
countries, or (with the exception of Cuba)
in the revolutionary vanguard of the Third
World. The few examples of Chinese films
available in the West show a completely
different line of development. This aesthetic,
developed more or less simultaneously in
France, America, Italy and Sweden, has
found its expression in none of these places.
The most intelligent attempts somehow
come off strangely stillborn: Godard’s One
Plus One is an exploration of what films
might look like if it really were possible to
make a film like One Plus One. The brilliant
successes of Gerardo Vallejo, Fernando
Solanas, Glauber Rocha and the rest only
emphasise more forcefully the vacuum in
which European and American directors are
working. The more strongly they feel about
democratised cinema, the less possible it
seems to attain it.
This dilemma has exacted a particularly
heavy toll on the Swedish cinema because
a much larger group of film-makers are
working toward these goals here than in
most other countries; and because the divi¬
sion between director and the ‘front office’
is much less pronounced in Stockholm than
at Universal or Mosfilm. The most in¬
fluential Swedish producers, such as Bengt
Forslund, Goran Lindgren, Peter Hald and
Bo Jonsson, are, one feels, as dedicated to
this ideal as any of the directors they work
with. It is precisely because the frustrations
of film-making cannot be attributed to
simple pressure from the top that they
become so insupportable.
Film-making in Sweden has become
politicised in ways not foreseen ten years
ago, and for reasons which are less ideo¬
logical than financial. The enormous cen¬
tralisation of resources has forced a series
of ‘political’ judgments to be made on film
production: facilities and capital are finite
and must be distributed in the most equitable
and efficient way possible. That the men
who preside over this distribution are re¬
markably enlightened does not negate the
essentially anti-democratic nature of the
process itself—a fact with which most pro¬
ducers here will readily agree. This process
implies that film is a commodity perennially
in short supply and that the function of
society is to see that its distribution is as
equitable as possible. The result is an econo¬
mic politics more of necessity than libera¬
tion, and I think it provides a key to many
of the more puzzling reactions of Sweden’s
younger artists. The terms in which Berg¬
man is so often denounced, for example,
spring less from a confrontation with his
films per se, than from an analysis of their
relation to the audience. They are seen as
luxuries for a non-productive class—esoteric
artifacts which the intelligentsia uses to main¬
tain its £lite position. Conversely, the box-
office success of a Widerberg film is not only
welcomed for the obvious reasons but seen
as a positive ideological triumph: movies
have broken out of the art houses and have
reached the people.
Bergman is attacked not only as a symbol
of an £lite but also because he represents the
Strindbergian tradition of styhsation, ex¬
pressionism and psychological probing.
That Bergman invariably draws his charac¬
ters from among the bourgeoisie is an
indication to his critics not only of ideo¬
logical irrelevance but also of the very
marked class differences that still characterise
Sweden after forty years of Social Demo¬
cratic rule.
It is in this way that the polarisation and
dissatisfaction have taken hold. The criteria
by which one judges the films have moved
outside the work itself; value depends upon
factors extraneous to the closed universe of
a screening-room. A Bergman film is rarely
attacked here for a failure to complete its
stated aims; the aims are simply dismissed
as irrelevant from the beginning.
That Bergman himself is immune to this
criticism has only made it more strident.
That his art has grown in complexity and
beauty precisely to the degree that he has
abstracted himself from a specific social
environment has only made it seem more
dangerous to his opponents. Few people
outside Sweden would seriously argue that
♦This action was appealed by Warner Bros, who
eventually succeeded in having the decision of
the State Censorship Board overruled.
95
Summer With Monica is a better film than
Persona , and yet it is the Bergman of the
former film who is most admired in this
country. One cannot help being reminded
of the strictures of atavism raised against
Bach in the late 18th and early 19th cen¬
turies ; in both cases what is criticised is not
the work itself but a preconceived structure
(be it harmonic superiority or neutrality of
language) that the work is accused of lacking.
At the same time, Bergman must be
recognised as a solitary phenomenon: future
developments in film-making will of necessity
turn further and further away from his path.
The tragedy is that so far no new paths
have been cleared, and the Swedish forests
are filled with Eclair-carrying film-makers
tramping through the underbrush, trying
to come together to build a highway. So
far, even the most talented and intelligent
among them have been unable to reconcile
the conflicts inherent in any art that aspires
not only to usefulness, but to utility as well.
One can take Vilgot Sjoman’s work as an
illustration. He was active in the 1950s
as a novelist and critic; he later became
96
a friend and student of Bergman. Through
his success with the I Am Curious films, he
hoped to spark a thorough-going debate
about all aspects of Swedish life, a debate
in which no other medium could be as
effective. Instead, he saw himself gaining
unwanted notoriety as a ‘sexually advanced’
director; the intently serious and scathing
social critique was simply smothered in
the voluminous curves of Lena Nyman’s
body. The most immediate effect of the film
is that it opened the floodgates to a torrent
of cheap pomo-comedies and facetious ‘sex-
education* films. Sjoman was probably too
bemused to be bitter, but in his next film,
You're Lying /, he returned to a more con¬
ventional documentary approach to attack
the prison system. His two most recent
films, Blushing Charlie and Troll, have
attempted to unite a lightly comic style with
an inherently serious political undertone.
At times they are very funny indeed, but
the tension between the two parallel aims
is never synthesised into a coherent whole.
Perhaps the saddest toll is a kind of cul¬
tural isolation that has enveloped the movie
houses. The film audience, not large to
begin with, has so polarised itself that when
a film arrives which is outside the current
spectrum of critical debate, it is simply
ignored. Thus it is virtually impossible to
see any films here by Bertolucci, Ray,
Bellocchio, or Bresson. Similarly, by con¬
fining themselves to specific social problems
and acting as vehicles for debate in Swedish
politics, it becomes very difficult for many
new Swedish films to find a foreign outlet.
With this as a background, the furore that
arose over the making of Ingmar Bergman’s
latest film can be seen to fit into a very con¬
sistent and often repeated Swedish cultural
pattern. Last September, Bergman began
shooting a colour film called Whisperings
and Cries on location in the Malar bay. The
financial arrangement is unusual in that this
is the first of Bergman’s films to be made as
a co-production between his own company.
Cinematograph, and the Film Institute. The
Institute’s support of Sweden’s most famous
artist has been sharply attacked by two quite
disparate groups: the younger directors and
critics, who feel that it should be the Insti¬
tute’s firm policy to support new directors
and controversial projects, and the heads of
the major production companies, who would
have liked the relatively secure financial
return that a Bergman film gives them. The
intensity of feeling that this arouses on both
sides runs very high and is no doubt ex¬
acerbated by the struggle for resources that
takes up so much of everyone’s energies
here. The argument has been conducted
almost entirely on financial lines, with the
Institute claiming that the Bergman project
will be profitable, thus making more money
available for maiden ventures, and the critics
charging that Bergman is no certain box-
office draw, and that in any case it will take
several years before the Institute receives
a return on its investment.
The film itself is seen by Bergman as a
development of concepts which he intro¬
duced in The Silence and Persona : the
isolation of specifics, the closure of an
environment, the re-examination of a
series of leitmotifs. Three sisters (Harriet
Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, and Liv Ullmann)
and a servant (Kari Sylwan) reunite in their
old manor house when one of them is
discovered to be dying from cancer of the
uterus. The shooting was done in an old
mansion near the town of Mariefred. As
often happens, the locale influenced the
entire structure of the film, and Bergman
said he felt as if he had written the setting
himself. One vital alteration was made to
the house: the interior walls were painted
in various shades of red. In the introduction
to the shooting script, Bergman commented
in answer to the inevitable question: ‘Don’t
ask me why it's to be that way , because I
don’t know. I’ve pondered the reason my¬
self and found each explanation more
comical than the other. The bluntest but
also the most tenable is probably that the
whole thing is something internal and that
ever since childhood I have imagined the
soul to be a damp membrane in varying
shades of red.’
Even greater than usual demands are
being placed on cameraman Sven Nykvist,
who must try to re-create (in Bergman’s
words): . dawns that don’t look like dusks,
soft hearthglow, the mysterious indirect
‘Whisperings and Cries': Bergman with Ingrid Thulin
Jan TroelVs 'The EmigrantsLiv Ullmann , Max von Sydozo
light the day it snows, the mild radiance of
the kerosene lamp. The torment of a clear,
sunny, autumn day. A solitary light in the
darkness of the night and all the fidgeting
shadows when someone wrapped in a
billowing nightgown hurries through the
large rooms.*
The shooting was finished last October,
but Bergman, as is his custom, left the film
in a first rough cut while he spent the winter
working at the Royal Dramatic Theatre. He
plans to resume editing in the spring and
Whisperings and Cries is expected to open
in the autumn of 1972.
Those film-makers whose work is least easily
categorised along political lines have been
no more immune to the pressures than
others; in fact it is often here that the limits
of these new demands express themselves.
The films of Jan Troell are an excellent
example. TroelTs second feature, Ole Dole
Doff {Who Saw Him Die ) is one of the most
remarkable films ever made in Sweden. It
deals with a self-destructive schoolteacher
(Per Oscarsson) who passively permits his
students to crush him, and it assaults the
viewer with a visual surface so powerful
and at the same time so ‘documentary’ that
one becomes totally absorbed into Troell’s
world. This kind of overpowering sensual
immediacy conveyed by nearly every image
creates an entirely different dimension, one
that transcends the content of each scene.
The viewer’s relationship with the film is
altered. Very few films achieve this kind of
visual symbiosis; one example is Bell-
occhio’s Fists in the Pocket. Interestingly,
Ole Dole Doff , which was shot by Troell
himself with a hand-held 16mm camera, has
a visual density that could probably not
have been achieved at all with 35mm. The
school where the film was made is the same
school in which Troell once taught; since
the crew was so small and unobtrusive,
many students hardly noticed the filming at
all. For all of its available-light realism,
there is something distinctly surreal about
this film; a constant and very powerful
ambiguity exists between the documentary
surface of the images and their expression-
istic undertone.
Troell’s recent The Emigrants has been
filmed from Vilhelm Moberg’s tetralogy
about Swedish emigration to North America
in the nineteenth century. The cycle will
be completed with a second film, Unto a
Good Land , to be shown this spring. The
Emigrants , in spite of its many virtues (it
is a solid, well-made film), lacks the density
and power of Ole Dole Doff. The reasons
for this are not simple. Troell is meticulous
in his attention to detail, the actors are
uniformly excellent: Max von Sydow, Liv
Ullmann, Eddie Axberg and Allan Edwall
have so perfected their ensemble playing
that the re-enactment of southern villagers
carries great conviction. Troell is faithful to
Moberg’s description of the hardships under
which these farmers lived. Their poverty is
not sentimentalised, the corruption of the
clergy and the callousness of the propertied
classes who ran the government are force¬
fully documented. Ironically, it is this very
accuracy that distances the viewer from the
movie. The effect is like listening to an oral
rendition of a well-known myth. The very
willingness of audiences to accept an accurate
picture of exploitation and brutality in their
own country (an acceptance that was also
seen with the success of Widerberg’s The
Adalen Riots) is a sign that the representa¬
tion of reality can become an inoculation
against just the consciousness that such a
representation was designed to bring out.
The Emigrants has been such a success
that it reputedly saved Svensk Filmindustri
—the world’s oldest film company still in
active production—from the threat of col¬
lapse. If the film could simply be judged as
art for its own sake, or even more simply as
entertainment, it would come off very well
indeed. But Troell and Moberg, who is one
of Sweden’s most socially active writers,
certainly intended something more. The
fact that the public embraced their work so
warmly only makes one feel all the more
that no audience is seriously prepared to
Johan Bergenstr&hle’s *48 Cook Street *
accept information that could constitute any
kind of threat to existing exploitative
systems, nor tolerate any structural arrange¬
ment that has not already been thoroughly
explored, pre-digested and defused.
Other paths taken toward the goal of
making politically viable films on a mass
basis have been much less successful, simply
because there are few young film-makers
with Troell’s gifts. The Emigrants represents
the most ambitious attempt to revitalise
socialist realism as a potent force in a society
which has refitted capitalist structures to
socialist forms and language. Life's Just
Great (Jan Halldoff), Elvira Madigan
(Widerberg), and especially A Swedish Love
Story (Roy Andersson) have taken a different
route—weaving a ‘hidden’ political message
into the structure of an ordinary, and often
97
enough very trite, entertainment film. Bo
Widerberg, who has worked both ways, has
described this latter method as the ‘baba-au-
rhum’ school of film-making: one cannot
expect the audience to eat the cake unless it
is generously soaked with rum. Comically
enough, it is the Swedish Maoists who arc
most vocal in their praise of this method of
film-making, but an analysis of its potential
need not go too far. Aside from the fact that
it has been done many times before (Metro’s
vaults are crammed with ‘message’ pictures)
there remains the inescapable conclusion that
banality is still banality—with or without
rum.
If the re-politicised film has so far shown
its limited effectiveness on the screen, it is
without doubt the major impetus toward
creativity in the most serious younger film¬
makers. It is a golden fleece that propels
artists of the most disparate temperaments,
and the unifying theme of the most widely
varying sensibilities. This search for the
political film is most interesting when seen
in the work of a single director. Johan
Bergenstrahle has made three films. Made
in Sweden , A Baltic Tragedy , and 48 Cook
Street. He is, in addition, one of the few
younger directors to continue in the tradition
of Alf Sjoberg and Ingmar Bergman, work¬
ing with equal intensity in film and theatre:
his production of Brecht’s The Good
Woman of Setzuan has been the hit of the
Stockholm season. All of Bcrgenstr&hle’s
films look completely different from each
other, and his film work (unlike Bergman’s)
is not at all related to his style of theatre
directing. This enormous disparity between
his films, rather than condemning him as a
‘styleless’ director, a non -auteur, is one of
the most interesting things about him. It
indicates a fluidity that is not so much a
reflection of Bergenstrahle’s personality as
a symptom of this attempt to somehow build
(or find) a radical sensibility. The means
used in this attempt are sometimes the very
antithesis of radicalism.
Made in Sweden is not so much a film as
a crash course in film-making. Every scene
is shot in a different style, and the sound¬
track is built up to a density that is almost
indecipherable. The influence of Godard
(even in the title) is obvious, but in spite
of the fact that the film isn’t really sure of
itself, it is an interesting attempt. As always,
an ambitious failure is of greater value than
an easy success. A Baltic Tragedy is a
chronicle of a very ambiguous chapter in
Sweden’s recent history: the deportation to
the Soviet Union of Lithuanian soldiers in
the German army who had fled to Sweden
at the end of World War II. Bergenstrahle
has explored the moral complexities of this
situation with a good deal of inventiveness,
maintaining at the same time both his
neutrality and involvement.
48 Cook Street , which was one of the few
films shot here this season, is a drama of
immigrant life in Stockholm. All the actors
are non-professionals, and much of the
dialogue will be in Greek. The post-war
influx of immigrants into Sweden has brought
enormous social changes, and in spite of
recent restrictions caused by the current
unemployment crisis, it is estimated that
within a few years 10 per cent of the popula¬
tion will be foreign. Bergenstrahle does not
regard 48 Cook Street as a ‘problem’ film
98
or a social expose; he simply wants to
portray the everyday life of a small group
of Greek immigrants, to present them sym¬
pathetically to an audience used to regard¬
ing them as alien and somewhat unmannered.
It will be interesting to see whether the
Swedish public will recognise the environ¬
ment as its own, the people as neighbours.
48 Cook Street is what most distributors
would probably call a ‘small’ film of limited
earning potential. That the Swedish cinema
has traditionally had room for such films is
one of its greatest credits; that the future
for such films is far from bright is a very
real danger. In a country like the U.S., with
its multiplicity of production sources, no
one needs to be as defensive about the ‘aim’
or social value of a movie: there is no in¬
herent conflict between the work of an Ed
Emshwiller and a Robert Wise. Sweden
lacks America’s luxuriant pluralism; there
are no major foundations, no university
grants, no giant corporations. The demands
exacted by the Film Institute, Svensk Film-
industri or Sandrews are, if anything, more
lenient than those of the minor companies.
In short, everyone drinks from the same
tap and when the fountain dries up every¬
one goes thirsty. The number of new pro¬
ductions is at a record low, the gap between
hit and flop is widening, and even after a
film is completed the problem of getting it
into distribution can be nightmarish.
Ironically, the film crisis has had one
overwhelmingly positive effect, an effect
whose impact is only beginning to be felt.
The squeeze that has been in many ways so
frustrating has sparked a tremendous de¬
velopment of technical resources. Film crews
have continued to shrink; equipment is
becoming more and more flexible. New
ways are being found to get increased
quality at less cost. In this respect Sweden
has always been at an advantage: not only
are there no medieval union regulations and
featherbedding, not only has there never
been a tendency toward mastodonic (60-f)
crews, but in addition, technical facilities
for all phases of film-making have been
undergoing a continuing refinement. In
America a film editor is still bound to his
Moviola, a paradigm of clumsiness and poor
design, while the convenient and logical
Steenbeck has become the European stand¬
ard. The deluge of quickly shot television
shows, which provides the bulk of a Holly¬
wood lab’s business, has led to a lamentable
decline in print quality. Not only are the
Swedish labs much more modern (print
timing and colour correction are carried out
by computer), but the degree of quality
control is absolutely outstanding.
These technical developments have accel¬
erated, in spite (and perhaps at least partly
because) of the film crisis. A recent and
important contribution has been made by
Swedish cinematographer Rune Ericson. He
replaced the standard aperture of an Eclair
NPR with a larger and wider aperture that
covers the entire area of a single-perforated
16mm frame. Not only does this increase
the image size by 40 per cent, but it also
elongates the ratio to the standard theatrical
1:1.66. With this system, a film is shot and
edited in 16mm and then enlarged on a
wet-gate optical printer to 35mm. Ericson
calls his innovation ‘Super 16’ and it has
been popularly dubbed ‘Runescope’.
This innovation has removed two of the
biggest stumbling blocks to a wider use of
16mm in theatrical films: excessive graini¬
ness and altered composition due to the
difference between the standard 16 and 35mm
ratios. The image quality still isn’t as good
as that obtainable with a studio camera, but
it is a vast improvement over standard 16mm
systems, and it has not yet reached the end
of its development. Blushing Charlie , Troll
and 48 Cook Street , as well as a number of
Danish pictures, were all shot in Runescope.
The cost for raw stock and developing is
fully 60 per cent lower than with standard
35mm, and the flexibility it allows is very
impressive: Sjoman shot Troll with a crew
of four. These technical developments are
not at all tangential to the creative aspects
of film-making; they are one of the major
factors in deciding whether a director is a
free agent or just a production foreman.
As with most technical advances, the use
of 16mm in theatrical films has at first meant
a decline in quality. Just as sound first
immobilised the camera, and colour brought
the art of lighting down to the quality of
postcard reproductions, so the use of 16mm
has often resulted in a compendium of
sloppincss and unprofessionalism that has
made it seem a regression instead of an
improvement. I believe this is just the first
result of its use. Sound and colour added
enormous subtlety to films precisely when
they first began to be used contrary to their
‘natural* functions. 16mm films will begin
to come into their own when they move away
from the documentary, available-light, hand¬
held world in which they were bom. Their
potential lies not in eliminating the subtlety
of sculptured lighting or the varieties of
camera movement, but in achieving these
ends with a simplicity and directness not
known to the studio bound.
Perhaps it is just this tendency to move
away from ‘natural’ functions that will be¬
come a positive aesthetic force as well. The
development of politicised cinema thus far
has achieved only its antithesis: polarisation,
rigidity and regression. It has been a long
time since Pudovkin taught us that sound
is most effective when played against the
image rather than with it. Perhaps the
politisation of film will be achieved using
themes far removed from politics.
In any case, it is clear that the situation
is one of maddening paradox: the freer
and more overtly engaged a film becomes,
the more restricted it seems in its dramatic
fullness and thematic complexity. Political
film as it is defined today could never be an
agent of change; it is too tightly bound in
the very apparatus it seeks to overthrow.
Today there is no political word or image
that has not become completely devoid of its
meaning. It is precisely because social reality
is being drained of its content that the sub¬
jective, non-communicative, personal world
of a Bergman has such potency. The past
century has seen a complete dichotomy
between social and artistic progress. The
refusal (or inability) of the politicised cinema
to recognise the new structures into which
we are being moulded only reinforces that
dichotomy. Revolutionary energy is being
dissipated, while the fumes rising from the
decay of an old order paint the sky with
patterns of indelible beauty and grace.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder will be twenty-
six next month. So far, since 1968, he has
made eleven films, directed at least as many
plays (several of them his own), and
frequently appeared as an actor in the
theatre and on television. This whirlwind
career suggests a dynamo. In fact, Fassbinder
is a short, podgy man with an old-fashioned
clipped moustache, in appearance the
archetypal gemiitlich Bavarian. As in his
films, though, appearances are deceptive.
Fassbinder’s account of how he came to
make films is characteristically laconic.
Nobody was working in the theatre in 1968,
he says, but a lot of people were making
films; so why not join them, using the ideas
tried and tested in his own Munich Action
Theatre? Those ideas had been revolu¬
tionary, even by the standards of a modem
German theatre founded on experiment.
Fassbinder saw his theatre group as a blitz
on theatre as the cosy and at that time mostly
exclusive province of the cultural bour¬
geoisie. So he monkeyed about with the
classics, slapped critical faces with idio¬
syncratic versions of Buchner and Ionesco,
and put on plays of his own which exposed
raw nerves in the complacent burghers and
tame radicals of a boom economy. The
group soon changed its name to Anti-
Theatre. D6cor was minimal, often just a
table and some chairs against a monotone
backcloth; and the productions were
characterised by a similarly monotone
acting style.
This austere aesthetic is also to be seen in
the films of Jean-Marie Straub, who has
clearly been a formative influence on
Fassbinder. Straub incorporated his own
Anti-Theatre production of Ferdinand
Bruckner’s Krankheit der Jugend into his
short film The Bridegroom , the Comedienne
and the Pimp , and the pivot of that film—
Top: Fassbinder and Karl Scheid in * *The
American Soldier*; centre: Hanna Schygulla in
*Gods of the Plague*; below: ‘ Katzelmacher \
99
a five-minute tracking shot along a Munich
street—finds a conscious echo in
Fassbinder’s first film Love is Colder than
Death. This gangster movie pastiche also
reveals the influence of the Godard of Bande
d Party but the uneven structure, as well as
the overall tone of precocious bravura, make
both these influences look unassimilated; the
best sequences in the film are also the least
original. Fassbinder had still to find his own
style. But this first film, for all its formal
inconsistency, pointed up in embryonic
form some of the themes which recur in his
work. In particular, the corrosive lure of
money, and the insane fantasies it en¬
genders (Fassbinder’s crooks are always
dreaming of flying down to Rio or there¬
abouts) ; and the casual violence, both
physical and emotional, of a group whose
mutual dependence saps their capacity for
individual action.
Group identity, its insularity and its
paranoid hostility to outsiders, is the basis
of Fassbinder’s second film Katzelmacher.
A Munich apartment block houses several
interchangeable couples, all of them bored,
listless and totally self-engrossed. The threat
to their complacency comes from a ‘Katzel¬
macher’ (Bavarian dialect for Gastarbeitery
or foreign worker), a Greek immigrant who
rents a room in the block. The newcomer,
played by Fassbinder himself with an
impishly deadpan innocence, is both an
object of curiosity to the group and the
catalyst for their previously suppressed
internal dissension, of which in the end of
course he is the victim. Irrationality runs
rife, characterised by sudden outbursts of
petty violence (one of the women keeps
getting her face slapped) as quickly for¬
gotten as they arc perpetrated, and fanciful
expressions of prejudice, like the revelation
that the Greek must be a Communist
because Greece is full of them.
With Katzelmachery Fassbinder articu¬
lated a style which fits his material like a
glove; indeed, form and content are here
virtually indivisible, since the ‘narrative’, as
in most of his films, is essentially trivial if
divorced from its formal context. He has
constructed the film like a rondo, or a game
of musical chairs (literally—the actors are
frequently caught changing their positions
round a table) in which the players finish
where they started. This circular effect is
underlined by two recurring formal varia¬
tions. The actors are periodically seen, in
a static medium shot which in itself is an
expression of the director’s cynical view of
them, sitting on a wall exchanging banalities
about each other and the Greek; and there
is a repeated interlude in which the camera
accompanies alternating pairs of actors as
they walk arm-in-arm across a courtyard
gossiping about the rest of the group, their
self-righteous pomposity punctured by a
Schubert melody on the soundtrack.
As usual in Fassbinder, except for isolated
and unpredictable bursts of temperament,
the dialogue is delivered in a soporific mono¬
tone. Speech is timed to a rhythm which has
the effect of disengaging the audience from
the characters and obliging them to re¬
consider the status of what at first seems
naturalistic. And just las the audience is kept
at one remove from the characters, the actors
(Fassbinder’s stock company) wear mask¬
like expressions throughout. It is as though
the characters were sleepwalking through
their encounters, which is of course exactly
what Fassbinder wants to suggest. This
vocal camouflage, along with Fassbinder’s
static long takes and deliberately un-
aesthetic group settings, deflects identifi¬
cation while at the same time forcing a
re-evaluation of the audience’s stance in
relation to the actors and their roles. The
facile temptation to see in Katzelmacher a
microcosm of German bourgeois society is
thus offset by the realisation that the lessons
of the film can be universally applied.
This conscious lack of definition is
Fassbinder’s version of what Bazin called
‘existentialist physiognomy*, an artifice
perfected in the films of Dreyer,
Bresson and Straub. The artifice lies in
the compression, the abstraction of any
‘significant’ extraneous detail: the settings of
Katzelmacher arc bare white walls and
the deadening perspective of the side
of a building shot flat on. The con¬
sequent absence of psychological nuance is
an effect Fassbinder plays on in most of his
films. Like Katzelmachery Why Does Herr
R. Run Amok? is more of a comment on
individual behaviour than on any identifiable
social group, even though the group here—
the army of the petit bourgeois—is instantly
recognisable. Herr R. is a draughtsman; he
has a wife, a child, a comfortable flat,
amenable colleagues and friendly neighbours;
by the social standards to which he him¬
self subscribes he should be content with
his lot. Why he isn’t, why indeed he finally
goes berserk, impulsively murders wife,
child and neighbour and hangs himself in a
lavatory, Fassbinder charts with a devastat-
ingly accurate catalogue of torment, the
more telling precisely because each detail,
trivial events as well as the final cataclysm,
is given equal weight. The interminable
minutiae of the daily round have seldom
seemed so enervating, and the measured,
unpunctuated pace establishes a tension
that is almost tangible. Seemingly oblivious
of the monotonous babble of the neighbour
or the trite embarrassments of an office
celebration at which he has to stumble
through a speech, Herr R. wears throughout
a glazed expression behind which boils a
volcano of resentment. The explosion,
totally unexpected though implicit in the
film’s every scene, comes as he is watching
television while his wife chatters away to the
neighbour; without saying a word, he picks
up an alabaster lamp and beats them over
the head.
During the climactic scene Fassbinder’s
camera is fixed on the television screen,
apparently mesmerised like Herr R. by the
flickering continuity of mind-numbing
trivia. This device of focusing off-centre is a
Fassbinder trademark. He is constantly
disconcerting his audience, fastening their
attention by paradoxically distracting them
from a scene’s focal centre. Gods of the
Plague, another of his pastiche gangster
movies, uses this trick throughout. The
opening is a classic piece of Fassbinder
double-take. A gangster just out of jail
enters the Lola Montes nightclub (like
Godard, Fassbinder peppers his work with
film jokes, though they are usually incidental
and so unobtrusive). Backstage a roulette
game is in progress, the table spotlit out
of the surrounding shadows. It might be a
scene from an archetypal Forties gangster
movie, and this is exactly the conditioned
reflex Fassbinder wants from his audience.
Having set it up, he confounds it at every
turn, parodying the Hollywood Forties
conventions in a story of betrayal and in¬
competence which is very much of the
Sixties. The hero is disconcertingly a black,
in a Munich underworld characterised by a
penchant for white coats; his former girl¬
friend now sleeps with a corrupt detective;
and after everyone in the film has talked
incessantly of money and the price of
betrayal, the final shoot-out is staged amid
the coffee tins and canned uniformity of a
supermarket—the nonconformist trapped
among the symbols of consumer conformity.
Throughout the film Fassbinder indulges
his own variation of the Brechtian V-Effekty
manipulating expectations in his audience
which he then confuses with a startling but
studied shock tactic. We are constantly being
challenged to rethink our jaded responses
to the cinema’s icons. In sharp contrast to
the earlier films, Gods of the Plague is almost
decorative in style: the images are worked
on, there is a highly theatrical use of
chiaroscuro in the interiors, there’s even a
free-wheeling helicopter shot as gangster
and friends drive through the countryside.
The relative elegance seems almost dilet¬
tantish until one realises that the very
artificiality of the style, in conjunction with
the mannered atonality of the dialogue, is
part of Fassbinder’s ploy to lull the audience
into expecting something very different
from what he in fact delivers. Like Godard
and Straub, Fassbinder knows how to use
theatrical mannerism to point up more
sharply his own awareness (and so the
audience’s) of film language, its limitations as
well as its potential. And the film past.
Fassbinder’s love affair with the gangster
movie is both critical and self-critical, as
another parody, The American Soldiery
makes abundantly clear.
The opening scene is again an affec¬
tionate evocation of the idiom of the
Hollywood gangster film. Three men sit
playing poker at a table in a basement room;
a lamp casts the only light in the room full
on their faces; somewhere in the shadows a
clock ticks. A telephone rings and the trio’s
leader, readily identifiable by his authorita¬
tive calm (as well as the fact that he keeps
winning the game), picks it up, listens in
silence and announces ‘He’s here’. Expecta¬
tions are again left dangling in the air, as
the mystery man turns out to be a Gcrman-
American just back from the Vietnam war,
returning as a hired killer to the now
unrecognisable Munich of his childhood.
He duly despatches his assigned victims,
efficiently, anonymously and without a
flicker of emotion, before being himself
killed at the hands of the trio, who turn out
to be cops doubling as gangsters. The killer,
laconic, white-suited, distractedly pulling
on a whisky bottle, is both a traditional
figure and a contradiction of that tradition.
He acts in a moral limbo, in a city seemingly
bereft of people. The individuality of the
Hollywood gangster is replaced by a
mechanical anonymity, and his milieu,
once governed by codes of behaviour even
in its darker quarters, is a moral wasteland of
hotel rooms and bars where only the mes¬
sages on the neon lights are to be taken at
► page 113
100
Pictures of Innocence
On the chaste, discreet poster for Carnal Knowledge, the name of Mike Nichols
preceded—and was not differentiated from—those of Jack Nicholson, Candice
Bergen, Arthur Garfunkel and Ann-Margret. A small detail, perhaps, but one
that could scarcely be more generally symptomatic or individually appropriate.
With the phrase ‘the director as superstar’ gaining increased currency as the 1970s
formulation of the auteur theory, no one seems more qualified for inclusion in the
category than Mike Nichols. The status which the industry has now publicly
accorded him is normally granted only to those directors (such as Ford or
Hitchcock) who are associated in the public mind with certain kinds of cinematic
experience; Nichols’ association seems to be primarily with enormous box-office
returns. His track record of four films in six years reads one moderate success
( Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), one solid success (Catch-22), and two smash
hits on a scale that gives substance to producers’ dreams ( The Graduate, with its
global gross exceeding fifty million dollars, and Carnal Knowledge, with its
promise of doing the same). No wonder that in the eyes of the industry, Nichols’
charisma is at the moment unrivalled. Perhaps that very charisma is a reason why
serious criticism in this country seems to have by-passed the crucial question of
Nichols’ identity as a director, in favour of treating his films as isolated units.
However, the nature of Nichols’ achievement in Carnal Knowledge —and given
his career up to now, it seemed a rather surprising one—provokes the question of
what characterises his work as a whole.
The announcement in 1965 that Nichols was
to make his debut as a film director on
Ernest Lehman’s production of Edward
Albee’s Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
seemed at the time rather surprising; but
knowing Nichols’ previous experience in the
theatre and show business, one can make an
educated guess as to why he was chosen.
That experience included a brief spell at
Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Workshop in New
York, a period of some hardship as a
professional actor, followed by a return to
Chicago (where he had graduated from
university). In the company of people like
Neil Simon, Alan Arkin and Elaine May,
Nichols moved into cabaret as a writer and
performer; with Elaine May, he began to
develop a routine of barbed dialogues
covering all the skirmishes of the sex war
whose success culminated in a Broadway
production. Nichols was persuaded to make
the transition to theatre direction with Neil
Simon’s gentle marital comedy Barefoot in
the Park. He went on to direct seven more
Broadway productions, which led to an
offer to direct a film version of Charles
Webb’s novel The Graduate. This project
was postponed in order to allow Nichols to
do Virginia Woolf ; and his career in films
thus got under way in the much more
prestigious company of Ernest Lehman,
Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and
Edward Albee.
These names, plus the enormous reputa¬
tion of the play itself, give a hint of possible
motives behind Lehman’s decision as
producer to offer Nichols the task of
direction. Quite apart from the general
reverence which Hollywood accords
material that has already proved its potential,
Lehman is one of that small group of
producers—Thalberg and John Houseman
amongst them—who arc attracted to projects
of some intellectual status. It can be
assumed, I think, that Lehman’s basic aim
was to preserve with integrity the whole
conception and infrastructure of Albce’s
play; his problem, therefore, was to ensure
that the film was both fluently cinematic and
faithful to the atmosphere of unbearable
marital claustrophobia. The problem was
solved by what was in essence a classic
Hollywood formula: two heavyweight stars
with a taste for culture to lure potential
audiences from that large section of the
population to whom the play’s name would
mean nothing, a supremely competent
cameraman and editor to provide the
cinematic expertise, and a tyro director with
three overlapping qualities—a skill in
handling comedy with serious overtones, a
familiarity with dramatic conflicts based on
sexual relationships, and an excellent repu¬
tation for working with actors. Lehman
himself as producer and screenwriter would
then be able to guide the entire team towards
the creation of the desired product—a
‘quality film’ that would be not only good
show business but also art.
It is difficult to avoid a tone of irony in
such speculations, partly because the basic
strategy of the production seems so curiously
old-fashioned (more typical of Hollywood in
the 1940s than in the mid-Sixties), but also
because the film which emerged from it
lacked the single quality that seemingly had
been excluded from the calculations—an
individual voice. For all its careful crafts¬
manship, the film never approaches the
electric tensions of the stage production.
(As Nichols remarked, the physical presence
of an audience before whom George and
Martha perform is vital to the play’s develop¬
ment.) Surrounding Virginia Woolfs
essential vacuum as a film are some con¬
siderable virtues—excellent performances
*Carnal Knowledge': Jack Nicholson
IOI
from Elizabeth Taylor and George Segal,
incisive clarity of exposition and inventive
control of dramatic climaxes. But as a whole
the film is so academically correct that one
suspects its principal value is to the teacher
dealing with Albee or with the play itself:
the sheer transparence that vitiates it in the
cinema justifies it in the classroom.
But the failure of Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? to be as much Nichols’ as it is
Albee’s should not imply that it can be
safely dismissed in favour of the more
obviously personal films that followed;
indeed, in two respects at least, it seems
crucial to a view of Nichols* work as a
whole. On a general level, Virginia Woolf
occupies the same thematic territory as
The Graduate and Carnal Knowledge ; more
specifically, it forms the source of a number
of motifs that reappear later. All three films
deal primarily with the sexual strata of
relationships in middle-class America,
particularly that segment of the middle-class
which is self-made, reasonably well-off,
oriented towards education in terms of
status, vaguely liberal (even the Robinsons’
daughter attends Berkeley) and morally
‘sophisticated*. The view of these relation¬
ships which all three films present is a
pessimistic one, with exploitation and self-
destructiveness the recurring characteristics.
Moreover, Nichols habitually charts the
same line of dramatic tension through his
material, a line which can be summed up as
the varieties of defeat suffered by innocence
in its confrontations with experience.
In both Virginia Woolf and The Graduate ,
these confrontations and defeats take place
within a relationship between a young man
and an older married woman; and in both
cases the motives are complex. For Martha
and Mrs. Robinson, Nick and Benjamin
represent the same temptation: to break the
rules for the sake of breaking them, to
‘do dirt’ on social environments that
constrict them without actually endangering
their own social positions, to reassure them¬
selves of their sexual vitality and, eventually,
to humiliate those they have seduced to
prove to themselves that experience has
given them the power to do so.
Nichols’ conception of Martha as ‘the
brilliant, over-educated, ball-cutting woman
who also has womanly feelings and alternates
between them’* is in some ways a simpler
one than that of Mrs. Robinson. One brief
scene in The Graduate , where Benjamin
vainly tries to have a serious conversation
with Mrs. Robinson between sessions in bed,
gives us the Martha aspect of her experience
that Mrs. Robinson has rejected in order to
have a different kind of life from Martha’s.
In fact, interpolating from both films, one
could guess that Mrs. Robinson would be
the only type of woman to intimidate
Martha, since she has all Martha’s qualities—
intelligence, humour, perception of other
people’s natures—plus the strength that
comes from a determination to belong to a
different world from a New England college.
It is clear that Mrs. Robinson feels both the
contempt for and dependence on her milieu
that Martha expresses so graphically in
Virginia Woolf —witness the casual, bored
expertise with which she picks up Benjamin
* In an interview published in Joseph Gelmis*
collection, appropriately titled The Film Director
as Superstar (Seeker and Warburg).
at his parents’ party, her skill in continuing
the affair under the noses of both families,
and her savage reversal when Benjamin
inadvertently threatens the one value centre
of her existence. (It’s also noticeable that in
certain sequences of The Graduate , such as
the hotel scenes, Anne Bancroft acquires a
physical resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor as
Martha.)
Compared with the density of characteri¬
sation given to the women, the young men
are slighter figures. As an innocent who
believes himself experienced enough to
handle Martha on his own terms (and learns
shatteringly that he is not), Nick seems in
some respects to be the prototype of
Jonathan in Carnal Knowledge ; in other
respects (such as his attitude towards his
wife) he looks forward to the character of
Sandy in the same film. He compares most
interestingly, however, with Benjamin, in
that he pays the penalty of humiliation
because his conceit will not let him grasp the
nature of Martha’s attitude towards him.
Benjamin, on the other hand, is able when
the moment comes to reject Mrs. Robinson’s
view of him as an object, to reject passivity.
Yet characteristically it is to his parents, who
are unaware of the situation, that he
announces his intention to marry Elaine;
and even more characteristically his decision
to act (the trip to Berkeley; the final
encounter with Mrs. Robinson in her house)
produces only frantic and almost ineffectual
action. The enchanted fairytale conclusion
to The Graduate is moving precisely because
of the ambiguity within Benjamin. As the
bus moves off with both him and Elaine
smiling defiantly at the audience, no real
transition from innocence to experience has
yet been made.
Revealing more, however, than a substantial
thematic continuity, a comparison of Virginia
Woolf with The Graduate brings into sharp
focus one of the central critical problems
posed by Nichols’ work. This is the problem
of style. It is tempting to read the tricksy
construction of The Graduate , with its
razzle-dazzle ‘now-you-see-it, now-you-
don’t* ellipses of visuals and soundtrack, as
the work of a director flexing stylistic
muscles after the necessary sobriety of a film
based faithfully on a highly claustrophobic
play. But after the very different styles of
Catch-22 and Carnal Knowledge , this seems
an insufficient explanation—the sheer range
of Nichols’ eclecticism is not contained by it.
Instead, it would seem that stylistically
Nichols is very much at the mercy of his
collaborators.
After working with Lehman to some
extent on the script of Virginia Woolf ,
Nichols chose Buck Henry to rewrite The
Graduate when previous drafts by William
Hanley and Calder Willingham proved
unsuitable. The time sequence of The
Graduate is in fact conventional. What makes
the film seem unconventional in structure
are the devices Nichols and Henry use to
compress time, particularly in the sequence
immediately following Mrs. Robinson’s sed¬
uction of Benjamin. According to Nichols,
these transitions were worked out before
shooting; and as the film stands, there are
two ways in which they can be criticised.
The first is that, in the first half of the film,
they appear obtrusively clever, channelling
our attention towards the technique itself;
the second is that, in the sequences after
Benjamin follows Elaine to Berkeley, the
invention runs out, and the construction
becomes choppy and confusing both with
regard to time-span and spatial relationships.
The numerous shots of Benjamin driving
back and forth along the freeway begin to
look so like mere padding that one might
well wonder at the time whether Nichols
was capable of handling straightforward,
economical narrative.
Superficially, the masterly conception and
execution of the screenplay for Catch-22
might seem to rebuke such a question; in
fact, it poses the problem of collaboration
even more acutely. Of Nichols’ four films
The Graduate and Catch-22 are the most
stylistically elaborate, both in terms of
narrative construction and editing devices.
And if there is evidence to support the view
that Buck Henry exercised a considerable
influence on the structure of The Graduate ,
it is reasonable to assume that this influence
also operated in the case of Nichols’ next
film. Certainly there seems a close similarity
between the transitional devices used in the
first half of The Graduate and those of
Catch-22 —indeed, the entire conception of
Catch-22 as a film seems to have been built
on such transitions.
But to this area of collaboration must be
added another. The work of David Watkin,
director of photography on Catch-22, has
always tended towards the virtuoso level—
on Tony Richardson’s Mademoiselle and
The Charge of the Light Brigade , for instance,
or on Richard Lester’s Help /. One suspects,
therefore, that Watkin also contributed
considerably towards the film’s style,
especially in shots like the opening one which
records the sunrise, pivots through 180
degrees, tracks across the runway as the
planes take off, and up into close-ups of
Yossarian telling Colonel Cathcart (although
we cannot hear the dialogue at this point)
that he has had enough, cranes down with
Yossarian’s departure to the attempted
killing, and finally fades out into burning
white as Yossarian collapses.
Such considerations as these perhaps
explain the paradoxical effect of Catch-22 —
that while it is Nichols* most successful work
in its own terms (until Carnal Knowledge) it
is also his most impersonal. Thematically
it is consistent with his other films, being
less an anti-war statement than another
examination of innocence confronting
experience. With much more aggression
than Nichols* earlier protagonists, Yossarian
attempts to define and make viable his
innocence by defiant non-involvement with
the combat operations of his unit. But once
again experience—in the shape of the
military system—displays its own resilience
by accommodating Yossarian’s half-
instinctive, half-deliberate acts of anarchy
within its own lunacy.
Nevertheless, the main impact made by
the film as a whole is its sheer ingenuity in
translating the breathless, roller-coaster
rhythms of Joseph Heller’s novel into film
terms; and the thematic core of a man
drawing a line and refusing to venture beyond
it becomes submerged in the intricate
structure of flashbacks. Moreover, the two
‘significant* passages (the dialogue between
the old man and Nately in the brothel, which
all but mentions Vietnam specifically, and
the facile up-beat ending, helicopter shot
102
Hoff matt , Katharine Ross in ‘The Graduate*;
Garfunkel, Candice Bergen in ‘Carnal Knowledge*
Anne Bancroft , Hoffman in *The Graduate';
Elizabeth Taylor , George Segal in *Virginia
Woolf
and all, as Yossarian heads for Sweden)
suggest that Nichols saw the film partly as a
platform for political statements. All in all,
it might be reasonably accurate to sum up
Catch-22 as two-fifths Nichols, two-fifths
Buck Henry and one-fifth David Watkin.
This does not mean that it fails to be an
engaging and resourceful piece of entertain¬
ment (there arc worse ways to spend
$10,000,000, use a roster of stars and avoid
showing rushes to the studio); but it does
make it a difficult film to come to terms with
in the context of Nichols’ career.
‘There is finally no heterosexual solution,’
Leslie Fiedler observed in Love and Death in
the American Novel , ‘which the American
psyche finds completely satisfactory, no real
or imagined consummation between man
and woman found worthy of standing in our
fiction for the healing of the breach between
consciousness and unconsciousness, reason
and impulse, society and nature.’ In Carnal
Knowledge Nichols has achieved one of the
most despairing variations on this theme to
be found in American cinema, and it is an
achievement that one would scarcely have
predicted on the basis of his earlier films.
In the place of that dogged refusal to be
intimidated by the sheer expressive potential
of the medium, there is a simplicity of style
which is far more affecting; in the place of a
conscious reaching out towards significance,
there is a precision of detail in expression and
gesture from which general meaning arises
naturally.
Carnal Knowledge records the friendship
of ‘deux hommes moyen Am^ricains’—
Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) and Sandy
(Arthur Garfunkel)—as it progresses from
their college days in the late 1940s to their
middle-aged affluence in the late 1960s.
Although we are given a certain amount of
implicit information about the backgrounds
and careers of the two men, their individual
development over the years is rendered
exclusively in terms of sexual attitudes; and
(despite being visually more discreet than
one might expect) Jules Feiffer’s screenplay
takes full advantage of the cinema’s new
freedom to give the dialogue a stinging,
exhilarating impact. It would be a mistake,
however, to categorise Carnal Knowledge as
one of those dialogue-laden films which
scarcely exists above the level of the script.
So far from that, Carnal Knowledge seems to
me the first of Nichols’ films in which other
people’s contributions are subsumed and
totally integrated into a personal work.
That it is a personal work can be demon¬
strated, first of all, on the thematic level.
Each of the five main characters—Jonathan
and Sandy; Susan whom they meet at
college, who is secretly seduced by Jonathan
but eventually marries Sandy; Bobbie who
moves in with Jonathan, marries him and
eventually divorces him; and Cindy, Sandy’s
second wife whom Jonathan makes an
abortive attempt to seduce—can be traced
back to earlier protagonists. The most
obvious example is Sandy, who is very much
a more realistic and convincing version of
Benjamin—just as Susan corresponds to
Elaine but lacks the latter’s aura of romantic
beauty. Their married life, which Sandy
movingly describes in the middle section
of the film, sounds rather like Nichols’ own
speculations about the style of married life
open to Benjamin and Elaine after their
escape from the church. Jonathan, on the
other hand, functions as an extreme version
—in some respects—of Nick in Virginia
Woolf. The interplay of character and motive
in the scene where he attempts to engineer
a change of partners and is rejected by
Cindy is very similar to the one between
Martha and Nick. As this indicates, more¬
over, Cindy is a younger, deliciously acid
version of Mrs. Robinson; and if she is the
only character to make her exit from
Carnal Knowledge on her own terms, it is
apparent to the spectator that she is paying
the cost of this—her hardness is already
evident. This leaves Bobbie, who has super¬
ficially no real counterpart in any of the
earlier films; yet the use which Jonathan
makes of her recalls the scene in The
Graduate when Benjamin humiliates Elaine
by taking her to a bar where a grotesque
stripper is performing. The contrast in
sexuality between the two women in this
scene perhaps suggests the origins of Bobbie
as a character.
All five characters in Carnal Knowledge
embody innocence and experience, but the
proportion alters from minute to minute in
the intricate shifts of relationship. The key¬
note of these relationships is exploitation,
and the complex patterns of exploitation are
presented through a visual style that counter¬
points them by its very simplicity. At this
level, too, one feels that Nichols is totally
in command. Working with a new writer
and cameraman (Giuseppe Rotunno), he
achieves an extremely lucid narrative con¬
struction, whose formal design seems very
different both from his own previous work
and from Feiffer’s—such as Little Murders.
Carnal Knowledge is organised in three
episodes, with the two men providing the
link. The first (set in a college campus
rather reminiscent of the one glimpsed
briefly in Virginia Woolf) acts as a lengthy
prologue; the second, which is edited in a
smoothly elliptical way, covers a much longer
period of time; and the third provides a
brief but devastating epilogue.
The division between episodes is marked
by close-ups of Jonathan, burning out into
white (the device used in Catch-22 to mark
the transition to Yossarian’s recurrent
memory). But this formalism is not used for
its own sake; it corresponds to the film’s
interior style, which is summed up, perhaps,
in a superb shot from the first episode. On
the left-hand side of the image, Sandy makes
self-conscious conversation with Susan,
whilst at the back of the room—in the centre
of the image—Jonathan watches, a cynical,
waiting figure. The depth of focus allows us
to perceive the three characters and their
inter-relationships in the round, and in its
dispassionate gaze is worthy of Preminger;
just as the film as a whole suggests the
influence of a known admirer of Preminger,
Eric Rohmer.
In fact, the most memorable visual images
in Nichols’ work have been those when the
screen is empty but for a face confronting
the camera—Benjamin, for example, or
Yossarian turning apprehensively towards
us in the cockpit. To these Carnal Know¬
ledge adds the searching close-ups of
Jonathan and Sandy as they haltingly
explain their emotions (ostensibly to each
other, in fact to us); and the two contrasting
images of carnality—Bobbie as she leans
back listening to Jonathan, and the anony¬
mous girl skater who ends the film on a
cold white vision.
It is, of course, impossible to offer at this
early stage of Nichols’ career any conclusive
summing-up, any one sentence definition of
what is distinctive and valuable in his work.
And Nichols himself would probably recoil
from any attempt to do so. After telling an
interviewer ( The Film Director as Superstar)
that it would be a mistake to regard films as
objects of permanent importance, he said,
‘The biggest kind of shmuck wants to be
remembered. The next biggest wants to
remember you. And the least shmuck of all
simply gathers information to take into his
grave . . .* ■
103.
Graham
Greene
as film critic
Judy Adamson
In 1935 Graham Greene became film critic for the Spectator . Young and inex¬
perienced as he was in reviewing films, he talked his way into the job at a cocktail
party.* In 1925 as an undergraduate he had written a few articles on film for the
Oxford Outlook , but otherwise his talents had previously been spent in writing,
and reviewing mostly novels and short stories. Nevertheless, he quickly became
regarded, to use John Grierson’s words, as ‘the best critic we had.’f He remained
the Spectator's critic until 1940, and in 1937 was also film critic for Night and Day .
During the same period he wrote incidental articles on film for Fortnightly
Review , The Times , World Film News and sight and sound.
What distinguished his criticism was its bite
and wit. ‘I sometimes wonder,’ he wrote
when reviewing A Midsummer Night's
Dream , ‘whether film reviewers are taken
quite seriously enough. Criticism, of course,
may not be quite in our line, but the pro¬
duction of A Midsummer Night's Dream has
shown beyond doubt that no one can shake
a better tambourine or turn a better table ...
Apart from criticism there is little we film
critics cannot do. We are superb mediums,
or is it an intuitive sympathy with the poet
which enables a Mr. Luscombe Whyte . . .
to tell us that Shakespeare “had he lived
now” would have approved of Herr Rein¬
hardt’s film version of his play ? . . . Alas, I
failed to get in touch with Shakespeare . . .
but I feel quite sure that Anne Hathaway,
“had she lived now”, would have thought
this a very nice film (I am certain of the
Dark Lady of the Sonnets).*
Clearly, he had no sympathy for his
colleagues who wrote for the middle class.
Neither had he any for the escapist film that
catered to its tastes. ‘Millions go to the
cinema, but do they get what they want or
do they get what the middle class public
wants—the cinema of escape ? The thou¬
* Author’s interview with Graham Greene
(October 1970).
t Author’s interview with John Grierson.
sands who come down to Wembley . . .
don’t want to escape.’ The cinema should
belong to them, and ‘any artist who rejects
the ivory tower, who wants his art to be
part of the vulgar natural life,’ should
welcome the chance to work for it.
At the time, Greene felt that novelists no
longer made any effort to create a really
popular art. He, on the other hand, had
always been interested in common art. His
early novels had been a form of popular
melodrama. But they reached only thou¬
sands. The cinema reached millions, and
he was challenged by the problem of pro¬
viding those millions with what they wanted.
‘Shakespeare had belonged to the people,
catching for the first time in verse the accent
of common speech, giving them the violent,
universal tragedies they understood. He
and Ben Jonson had served the people and
the people had moulded them.’ ( British
Dramatists , London, 1942)
Greene wanted the cinema to give the
common people what the great Elizabethan
dramatists had. But the twentieth century
artist ‘could no longer be heartened by the
direct applause, or criticised by the direct
disapproval, of the common people. He
would hear only the crackle of chocolate
paper, the whispers of women with shopping
baskets, the secret movements of courting
couples.’ The artist should take heed of
these crackles and whispers and realise that
they existed because he had not given his
audience what it wanted. It ‘didn’t want to
be soothed: it asked to be excited.’ ‘It
wanted something as simple and exciting
as a cup-tie, just as the Elizabethan public
wanted something as brutal and exciting as
what went on in the bear-pit.’ And the
bear-pit aroused a communal response,
which was, ‘not the sum of private excite¬
ments, but was mass feeling, mass excite¬
ment, the Wembley roar.’
The cinema, like the sports spectacle, is a
physical medium. A film makes a direct
impact on the audience. The response of an
isolated reader or a theatregoer, separated
from the actors by the footlights, is not the
same as that of the film viewer. Alone,
hidden in a crowd, a spectator watches from
a darkened room. He identifies with what he
sees, experiencing simultaneously those
emotions he watches played out before
him. If the film-maker knew what he was
about, Greene felt he could use this intimacy
to draw his audience into such mass excite¬
ment as that of Wembley, or into such mass
feeling as that of the Elizabethan theatre.
Once he had done this, he could begin
subtly to ‘put over what he would of horror,
suffering, truth.’
Examples of films that aroused this kind
of communal feeling were difficult to find.
Greene cited ‘ Duck Soup , the early Chaplins,
a few shorts by Laurel and Hardy . . .
perhaps Fury s Le Million and Men and Jobs.
These did convey the sense that the pictures
had been made by their spectators and not
merely shown to them, that they had sprung,
as much as their sports, from their level.’
Like many others, Greene was interested
in the cinema’s vast audience. Lenin con¬
sidered film the most important of the arts;
John Grierson’s initial interest in it was as a
powerful propaganda medium. But even
though Greene was fascinated by the idea
of reaching millions, he had no more interest
in the film as propaganda than he had in it
104
as an escape mechanism for the bourgeoisie.
His concern was aesthetic. He believed that
when the artist had involved his audience in
the popular drama, then he could subtly
develop the poetic drama. The film was a
medium which did not require a high level
of literacy on the part of its audience, yet
which allowed this audience glimpses of
the poetic withheld from the common
people since the Puritans closed the theatres.
It could create images visually that only a
handful of writers had been able to do
verbally; and could arouse the kind of
communal feeling that would make those
images an everyday part of people’s lives.
It was toward the definition of this popular
‘poetic cinema’ that Greene devoted much
of his time as film critic. Ford Madox Ford
had divided fiction into novels and nuwels
(those stories he didn’t consider as art).
Greene followed suit, dividing films into
cinema and movies. The latter represented
the commercial escapist film. The former
held greater possibilities, and it was here
that he began his analysis of the poetic
cinema. Like so many of his ideas about the
novel, this consideration was influenced by
Chekhov, rooted as it was in the realisation
that the only subject matter for art was ‘Life
as it is and life as it ought to be.* To be valid
an had to hold this antithesis. On film this
meant that ‘every poetic image should be
chosen for its contrasting value.’
Using We From Kronstadt as an example,
he talked of ‘the gulls sweeping and coursing
above the cliffs where the Red prisoners
are lined up for their death by drowning,
the camera moving from the heavy rocks
around their necks to the movement of the
light white wings.’ Juxtaposing images of
peace and freedom with images of war and
death, the camera showed life as it ought to
be and life as it was, gaining immense
poetic power from the contrast. Greene
was defining something more aesthetic than
cinematic here, for he was talking about a
picture of reality as incomplete unless it
contained its obverse—what ought to be.
In filmic terms, that meant it must include
both what was before the camera and what
the artist felt were human possibilities.
Although he did not discuss the technical
elements of these contrasting images, he
made it quite clear that they were the com¬
bination of more than photography and
cutting. ‘Photography by itself cannot make
poetic cinema ... it can only make arty
cinema. Man of Aran was a glaring example
of this; how affected and wearisome were
those figures against the skyline, how
meaningless the magnificent photography
of storm after storm.’ Meaning came only
*Man of Aran ’
with ‘the personal lyric utterance, the indi¬
cations of life as it should be.’
Poetic cinema need not be complex. It
could be ‘built up on a few very simple
ideas ... it didn’t require a great mind to
conceive them, but it did require an imagi¬
native mind to feel them with sufficient
passion ... Simple, sensuous and passionate,
that definition would not serve the cinema
badly.* Alexandrov’s Jazz Comedy had this
‘ The Jazz Comedy *
quality. Greene spoke of its ‘almost
ecstatic happiness ... its sense of good living
that owed nothing to champagne or women’s
clothes.’ He ‘rejoiced in its simple irrele¬
vance ... its wildness, its grotesqueness.’
Charlie Chaplin had ‘a few simple ideas . . .
courage, loyalty, labour against the nihilistic
background of purposeless suffering . . .
He didn’t try to explain, but presented with
vivid fantasy what seemed to him a crazy
comic world without a plan.*
Of the films Greene reviewed, few satisfied
these rigorous criteria. Some, like Dodsworth ,
were partially satisfactory. They had the
great virtues of natural acting and natural
speech, presenting life as it is; in this case
as it appears to an American millionaire.
But they did not show life as it ought to be.
Dodsworth's version of that was an unrealis¬
tic Italian villa on the bay of Naples and a
refined widow. Hardly a poetic portrayal.
There were many other such examples.
Cecil B. deMille handled an army of extras
on the big sets as could no other director,
creating a sense of reality that was horrify¬
ingly true to life. But in all but The Plains -
man , these moments of brilliant detail lasted
only minutes in very long films. Perry Mason
was Greene’s favoured film detective because
he was cadaverous and not well dressed,
wearing a seedy hat and straggly moustache,
frequenting the same haunts as his crimi¬
nals. In Poppy , W. C. Fields* complete
dishonesty afforded a portrayal as vivid as
that of any Dickensian character. But all of
these films lacked that ‘critical purpose’ that
made the cinema poetic. The sense of life as
it should be was not there; and that sense,
which ‘must always be a critical one,’ was
as important to the poetic cinema, and to all
art, as was the sense of how life was. Perhaps
it was even more important. It was certainly
the more difficult to capture, for it meant
that a director had to analyse his material,
making it transcend its actuality.
Again and again Greene returned to Basil
Wright’s Song of Ceylon. ‘Faulty in con¬
tinuity as it was,’ it contained more of what
he was looking for, ‘criticism implicit in the
images, life as it should be.* Criticism
implicit in the images—here was the essence
of Greene’s cinematic canon. In We From
Kronstadt , the scene he had described
juxtaposed two contrasting shots (one of
life as it ought to be, the other of life as it
was) making one poetically whole image.
The freedom of the birds is as much a part
of the execution sequence as the stones
around the prisoners’ necks. Without both
the sequence loses its meaning, just as does
a linguistic trope when you separate its
parts. The two shots are inextricably fused
in the one image, producing a complete
vision of reality.
The reason Greene disliked Man of Aran ,
and most of Flaherty’s work, was that he
did not find this kind of philosophical
montage in its images, a montage which was
above all dramatic. Flaherty tried to create
such dramatic sequences artificially. In this
instance he had taught the inhabitants of
Aran to shark hunt. To Greene’s realist eye
this was unnecessary, for the drama of
poetic contrast was implicit in the lives of
the people of Aran. Flaherty did not need to
create it by manipulating their lives; he
merely needed to capture it in the critical
sense Greene had spoken of.
What Greene was asking of the camera was
that it should not lie. In The Innocent Eye ,
Calder-Marshall quotes Flaherty as saying
that ‘sometimes you have to lie ... one often
has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit.’
Greene disagreed. Its true spirit was not in
this kind of distortion but rather in the
critical juxtaposition. This does not mean
that he asked film to present a slice of life.
Rather, he asked of it an honest, but critical
and poetic representation of reality. He did
not believe the audience could be fooled
by Flaherty’s kind of distortion. In contrast
Greene offered Armand Denis’ Dark Rap-
ture , a film about Africa from which one
carried away ‘a sense of innocence, of human
dignity reduced to its essentials . . . what
Africa was before the white man came,*
and George Hoellering’s Hortobagy y a film
about the Hungarian plains acted by peasants
and shepherds.
It was only when the audience recognised
‘the truth of a general scene . . . that it was
prepared to accept the truth of the individual
drama,’ and as a novelist Greene knew very
well that it was the individual drama that
expanded the consciousness of the audience.
‘None of us believes very deeply in news . ..
in the big events, the march of an army
corps and the elimination of a people.’ What
makes us believe is a sense of involvement,
which it was the camera’s job to facilitate by
noting with precision and vividness an
‘atmosphere that would give the story back¬
ground and authority.’
He found Carol Reed particularly good
at this. ‘Reed’s camera went behind the
dialogue . . . acting with a kind of quick
shrewd independence . . . presenting its
own equally dramatic commentary, so that
the picture [here of suburbia in Laburnum
Grove ] seems to be drawn simultaneously
from two angles.’ The detail picked up
by Reed’s camera, and the authenticity of
atmosphere it created, impressed Greene.
Little did he know in 1936 when he con¬
cluded the review by saying ‘Mr. Reed will
prove far more efficient when he gets the
script right,’ that he himself would be pro¬
viding the script, in fact two of them: The
Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).
From these few examples one might suspect
105
that Greene’s sympathies lay with the docu¬
mentary movement, that he most often
found cinema to be poetic in the images
created under its auspices. It is true that he
repeatedly praised Grierson and the GPO
Unit, listing several of its films among his
favourites; but they were not the majority
on that list which included, among others,
Cavalcanti’s Rien que les Heures , Robison’s
Shadows , Pudovkin’s Mother , Chaplin’s
Gold Rush, Stroheim’s Foolish Wives, Clair’s
The Ghost Goes West , Chenal’s Crime et
Chdtiment , Menzies’ Things to Come and
Eiscnstein’s October. He did, however, con¬
tinually use the documentary’s simple
honesty to emphasise by contrast the pre¬
tensions of the feature film.
Thus he attacked the star system which
stabilised the audience’s attention on the
star rather than on the film, allowing cheap,
shoddy work to pass unnoticed. Similarly
he spoke against the long film which usually
had to be padded to fill two hours. He com¬
plained about the gaudiness of colour,
asserting that it ‘would put film back tech¬
nically twelve years.’ Later, realising that
it had come to stay, he insisted that a way be
found to use it ‘realistically, not only as a
beautiful decoration.’ Stating that it must
‘be made to contribute to our sense of truth,’
he asked, ‘can Technicolor reproduce with
the necessary accuracy the suit that has been
worn too long, the oily hat ?’
Greene’s choice of actors was also influ¬
enced by this concern for realism. Ingrid
Bergman’s first appearance in Escape to
Happiness was one that ‘didn’t give the effect
of acting at all, but of living.* She was ‘as
natural as her name . . . with a high-light
gleaming on her nose-tip.’ With Greta
Garbo, ‘you got an impression of immense
force in reserve, an unexpressed passion of
life. It was a quality of character rather than
of acting . . . Neither she nor Paul Muni
acted in this sense; they existed vividly and
without apparent effort.’ It was this same
criterion which led him to praise French films
for using realism more imaginatively than
their British and American counterparts.
So important was realism to him that he
feared any attempt to use montage univer¬
sally, even though he thought it would
instantly raise the standard of film produc¬
tion, because he felt it would ‘keep the
mind at too high a tension . . . not allowing
for the non-vital moments of life to be
shown.’ This would be unfaithful.
Greene’s lack of compromise was well
known in the film world. He belonged to no
school and he regarded nothing as sacred.
With equal acidity he attacked his fellow
critics and Hollywood films. The former
were corrupt. The latter were adolescent,
vulgar, sentimental, hollow, and filled with
exaggerated sex. Only occasionally ‘did a
film of truth and tragic value get somehow
out of Hollywood on to the screen. Nobody
could explain it—perhaps a stage needed
using, all the big executives were in con¬
ference over the latest Mamoulian “master¬
piece”—Jehovah was asleep, and when he
awoke he found he’d got a Fury on his hands,
worse still They Wcm't Forget .’ ‘What’s the
use in pretending,’ he added while reviewing
The Road Back, ‘that with these allies it was
ever possible to fight for civilisation ? For
Mother’s Day, yes, for anti-vivisection and
humanitarianism, the pet dog and the home
fire, for the co-ed college and the campus.
106
Civilisation would shock them: eyes on the
guide book for safety, they pass it quickly as
if it were a nude in a national collection.’
His bete noire was the Board of Film
Censors, which he complained allowed more
freedom to the Americans than to its own
poorer countrymen. His last and perhaps
most telling attack against the Board came
in 1940, when it gave The Wizard of Oz an
A certificate. ‘Surely,’ he wrote, ‘it is time
that this absurd committee of elderly men
and spinsters who feared, too, that Snow
White was unsuitable for those under sixteen,
was laughed out of existence ?’
Only once were his remarks repressed, and
then on legal not aesthetic grounds. The
incident arose over his October 28, 1937
review of the Shirley Temple film Wee
Willie Winkie, which appeared in his
regular column in Night and Day , a kind of
Londoner’s New Yorker that listed among
its columnists, in addition to Greene,
Elizabeth Bowen, who reviewed the theatre,
and Evelyn Waugh, who did books.
Reviewing Captain January the previous
year in the Spectator, Greene had written
that Shirley Temple’s popularity ‘seemed to
rest on a coquetry quite as mature as Miss
Colbert’s [in Under Two Flags] and on an
oddly precocious body as voluptuous in
grey flannel trousers as Miss Dietrich’s.’
This review seems to have caused no com¬
ment. The Wee Willie Winkie review was
another matter. Shirley Temple (then aged
eight) and 20th Century-Fox sued Greene,
Night and Day, Hazell, Watson and Viney,
Ltd. (the magazine’s printer) and Chatto
and Windus (its publisher) for libel, in a
case that appeared before the King’s Bench
on March 22, 1938.
Greene’s review cannot of course be
quoted here. It was described by Sir Patrick
Hastings, counsel for the plaintiffs, as
‘such a beastly libel to have written that if it
had been a question of money it would have
been difficult to say what should be an
appropriate amount to arrive at.’ Godfrey
Winn, writing in the Daily Mirror, thought
the review ‘a queer one, because it was not a
criticism of Shirley’s clever acting at all,
but one which introduced potential audience
reactions—reactions which were entirely
alien to Shirley’s lovable and innocent
humour.’ Night and Day had in the mean¬
time ceased publication, the issue in question
being withdrawn from the news stands, and
Greene had left for Mexico after being
assured by his lawyer, Valentine Holmes,
that he had written nothing libellous, and
that his name would not come up at the
hearing.*
However, it did. In a rather comic se¬
quence the judge asked repeatedly where
Greene was, and Mr. Holmes repeatedly
answered that he had no information on the
subject. Holmes apologised (in order that
the record be withdrawn) to Shirley Temple
‘for the pain which would certainly have
been caused to her by the article if she had
read it’ and to the two film companies (20th
Century-Fox Film Corporation and 20th
Century-Fox Film Company Ltd.) ‘for the
suggestion that they would produce and
distribute a film of the character indicated
in the article.’ The Wee Willie Winkie
libel case had put Night and Day out of
* Author’s interview with Graham Greene.
business, and reinforced the coffers of
Shirley Temple, the Film Corporation and
the Film Company to the tune of £2,000,
£1,000 and £500 respectively.
The suit, however, had little effect on
Greene’s film criticism. His trip to Mexico,
commissioned earlier by Longman Green
who wanted a report on religious persecu¬
tion there, was unhampered. Later in 1938,
when he returned to London, he took up
his old column in the Spectator, continuing
to write well into 1940.
It is easy to assess Greene’s film criticism.
One has only to choose at random from the
many reviews and articles to be entertained
by a witty and creative journalist. However,
it is more difficult to come to some reason¬
able understanding of its significance.
Weekly reviewing after all leaves little
space for the formulation of original theory.
Greene was reviewing during an exciting
period in film history. His ideas about a
common and poetic cinema were not unique:
what he sought in the commonplace was
similar to what John Grierson looked for.
Both desired to make a drama from the ordi¬
nary. Both desired that the camera dig deeply
into everyday life, capturing the things that
most often went unnoticed. What Greene
described as contrasting poetic images was
similar, although greatly simplified, to
Eisenstein’s concept of montage, or to what
he called in Film Form ‘montage trope’,
which created ‘a new quality of the whole
from a juxtaposition of the separate parts.'
Greene’s desire to create for an audience
what it wanted was similar to what Charlie
Chaplin in fact did. It was the combination
of these ideas that was unique. It came not
from a film background but a literary one.
This special combination arose from the
enthusiasm of a young but already success¬
ful novelist who saw in the medium the
‘possibility of a new kind of art ... of a
picture as formal in design as a painting,
but a design which moved.’ It came from
an eagerness to popularise that new art by
beginning at ‘the level of The Spanish
Tragedy ’ and moving slowly ‘towards a
subtler, more thoughtful level . . . where
human values could be suggested.* It would
be a movement the reverse of that from
Webster to Tennyson, ‘which was not
merely a decline in poetic merit . . . but a
decline in popularity.’
Greene was not a film theoretician, nor
was film his primary interest. In fact, he has
continued to claim that his involvement
with the medium has been out of financial
need (something one questions considering
his unfortunate experiences with the cinema,
and yet his continuing return to it). But
although the film did not figure largely in
his background before this period of intense
critical activity, it is obvious thit he never¬
theless understood its aesthetic possibilities
and the problem of popularisation confront¬
ing it. Greene called for films of imagination
and vision, a cinema both poetic and com¬
mon. It is unfortunate that as with so many
other novelists who have worked for the
medium, his ideas have had little effect on it.
Quotations are mainly from Graham Greene's
‘ Spectator ’ reviews. Also from reviews and
articles in ‘Fortnightly Review ’, ‘Night atid
Day', ‘Footnotes to the Film ’ and ‘Sight and
Sound'.
i Film i
REVIEWS
The Last Picture Show
In one of the final sequences of Peter Bog¬
danovich’s The Last Picture Show (Columbia-
Wamer), two teenage boys miserably outgrow¬
ing their adolescence in the year 1951 attend
the closing performance of the only cinema in
the disintegrating town of Anarene, Texas. On
screen, John Wayne surveys the cattle herd that
fills the Texas plainland as far as the eye can
see and orders, ‘Take ’em to Missouri, Matt!’
The boys agree that Red River was a good film
and wander out into the deserted street, making
no connection between the tumbleweed waste¬
land that surrounds them and its proud, and in
part mythical, pioneer heritage. The only
character old enough to remember better days
and lament the emptying of the landscape (Sam
the Lion, played by Ben Johnson, a sideshot
rider from many a more recent Western) dies
a short while before the town’s cinema, his
death somehow formalising the end of an epic
era. For the boys themselves, there is nothing
to mourn and little to aspire to. Too passive
to rebel against the ever narrowing circles of
their lives, they convert their frustration to
instant regret, endlessly replaying their memory-
brightened high school relationships like so
many dusty gramophone records.
It is one of the cardinal virtues of this
brilliantly understated film that Bogdanovich
never takes the easy option of mingling his
characters’ nostalgia with his own, never allows
his evident regret for vanished worlds and
wasted opportunities to intrude directly on his
film’s impeccably detailed surface realism. That
The Last Picture Show establishes, and holds
for its full 118 minutes, a mood of elegiac
wistfulness is due in some large measure to the
sheer accumulation of unobtrusive detail. The
hero’s 1941 Chevrolet pick-up truck, the sounds
of Johnnie Ray, Frankie Laine and a host of
Country-and-Western singers straining out of
every diner loudspeaker and car radio, a brief
clip from Father of the Bride on the boys’ first
trip to the movies, ‘Strike It Rich’ flickering
half-watched on the living room TV screen: all
of these awaken the audience to their own
nostalgia and gently seduce them into an
emotional complicity—not with the characters,
who ignore or exploit the furniture of their
lives, but with the director, who has so pains¬
takingly brought it all back to life for us, and
in so doing created an infinite hall of mirrors in
which everyone, audience and characters, is
wistfully looking over his shoulder at the re¬
ceding image of his own pale paradise.
In their eagerness to herald Bogdanovich as
the young director who will restore their
national cinema to its former glory, American
critics have zealously likened him to Welles
and his second feature film (his first was Targets )
to Citizen Kane. Yet the comparison is invidious
as well as misleading. For if Bogdanovich stands
out from the ranks of contemporary film-makers,
it is not for any innovations of technique or
subject matter but rather for the loving perfec¬
tion with which he revives a vanished crafts¬
manship. Though the shadow of Welles, as
well as of Hawks, hovers benignly over the
picture, Bogdanovich refrains from dipping
flamboyantly into the Master’s box of tricks,
content to chart, without dramatic punctuation
marks, the quiet atrophy that gnaws at the lives
of his inexorably and unknowingly doomed
community.
The Last Picture Show is one of the very few
films of recent years whose form and content
seem, in the best Flaubertian sense, inseparable.
It is not simply photographed in black and
*The Last Picture Show *: Ben Johnson, Timothy Bottoms , Sam Bottoms
white, it is evidently conceived in it, as being
the only true colouring for these dust-blown
streets and drab, draughty lives. Y$t while
Robert Surtees’ photography triggers off some
cinematic memories of the kind of movies they
don’t make any more (and already hardfy made
in the Fifties), it manages, like everything else
in the film, to achieve a perfectly calculated
balance between faultless realism and senti¬
mental association. If the extreme depth of
field photography contains conscious echoes of
Citizen Kane, the screen ratio attests its more
modem origins, while the lighting is matched
to the unassertive naturalism of the perfor¬
mances. All the scenes, interiors as well as
exteriors, were shot on location in the literally
one horse town of Archer City, and the cramped
rooms are lit to reflect rather than disguise or
dramatise their quietly corrosive claustrophobia.
Similarly the cast, made up of newcomers and
established bit part players, are presented with¬
out the glamorous sheen and seductive shadows
Timothy Bottoms , Cloris Leachman
of the old style Hollywood lighting. Indeed,
they seem at first to have been chosen for a
common quality of anonymity; and if they
gradually impose themselves—as characters,
actors, even stars—it is through the conviction
of their performances and the gradual revelation
of their drab adventures.
This sustained downbeat emphasis is a
crucial element of the film’s success, since the
novel by Larry McMurtry (whose Horseman,
Pass By emerged as Hud after some revamping
by Hollywood scriptwriters) might in less
sensitive hands easily have been converted into
the most excessive Peyton Place soap opera.
All the ingredients are there, for it is not merely
a saga of small-town life (that genre beloved of
afternoon TV programmes in the States) but
one whose events consist almost entirely of
deaths and sexual couplings amongst the town’s
inhabitants. There is the local idiot boy run
over by a cattle truck (ironically, the only cows
in the film are penned in the back of a lorry);
there’s the high school coquette, Jacy, leading
all the boys on, going steady with Duane,
swimming nude with Lester, chasing after
wealthy Bobby, raped on the pool table by her
mother’s lover, and eloping with Sonny to
attract attention; there’s Sonny, fumbling his
way towards sexual experience in assorted auto¬
mobiles, willingly seduced by Ruth, the football
coach’s wife, and half blinded by Duane in a
fight over Jacy; and Duane himself, obsessed
with Jacy and eventually shipped out to Korea,
still brooding on the hour he spent with her in
a motel.
Though he records the occasional moment
107
of tenderness (mostly between Sonny and
Cloris Leachman’s Ruth, miraculously alter¬
nating a creased despair with a glowing radiance),
Bogdanovich never shows a satisfactory sexual
encounter or a moment of love that is not
overlaid with pain. Sam the Lion’s apocryphal
fulfilment with Jacy’s mother is a thing of the
past, embellished by memory; and it is character¬
istic of the film’s experimental relationships that
Jacy emerges from her eager defloration by
Duane complaining, ‘I don’t think you did it
right.* Sex is simply one way (and with the
picture show closed, almost the only way) of
passing the time and escaping from the tedium
of marriage, school or menial labour—a
desperate assertion of power among the socially
impotent. The field of choice is limited, and the
acceptance of limitations is what growing up in
Anarene is all about. When Sonny (Timothy
Bottoms) learns that Ruth’s husband will shoot
him if he hears of their affair, he accepts this
information without protest or excitement, as
part of the established order of things, in the
same matter-of-fact way that Duane accepts
that he’ll be back in a year or two if he doesn’t
get shot, and Sonny himself accepts the natural¬
ness of his best friend damaging his eye in a
fight.
Yet if the film’s incidents cumulatively
suggest a painful process of attrition, they are
individually comic, even farcical, with Bog¬
danovich perfectly capturing both the aspira¬
tions and the bathos of the inarticulate pursuit
of happiness. Cybill Shepherd as Jacy and Jeff
Bridges as Duane in particular convey the
awful solemnity with which teenagers make
fools of themselves. It is in this unbridgeable
gap between desire and performance that the
film’s real drama takes place, as Bogdanovich,
keeping his audience in a suspended state of
compassionate amusement, illuminates boredom
from within and without and makes it
entertaining.
JAN DAWSON
Macbeth
Polanski’s is a cinema of obsession. In each of
his feature films he has established a central,
claustrophobic theatre of action, stressed its
isolation by a running counterpoint with glimpses
of the world outside, and used his characters*
imprisonment as a catalysing force to bring their
obsessions to a climax. Obsession can be either
comic or horrifying, and Polanski’s work has
tended to split itself into two groups: the black
comedies ( Cul-de-Sac , Dance of the Vampires)
and the psychological shockers ( Repulsion ,
Rosemary's Baby). The settings have underlined
the division: castles are extravagant and ‘remote*
and suit surrealist comedy, while apartments are
contemporary and ‘real’ and suit psychological
drama. Also despite a partial overlapping within
these categories (shock effects in Dance of the
Vampires , the black comedy of the last scene
witches* soiree in Rosemary's Baby), Polanski’s
sense of humour and sense of horror are so
strong individually that each tends to work only
at the expense of the other. The first thing to
notice about his film of Macbeth (Columbia*
Warner) is that it represents a cross between
these two groups: a castle setting is married to a
‘psychological* drama, and there is, if not a
comic, at least a more externalised, self-critical
approach to potentially melodramatic material.
Where Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby veered at
their worst towards sentimental contrivance,
Macbeth locates the mental torment of its
characters not in an indulgent novelistic limbo,
but in a credible, historically detailed social
context.
What the film lacks in claustrophobia it thus
makes up for in general credibility. Apart from
the passages of violence or dream (and striking
momentary images like Duncan’s crown
throwing its gaunt shadow on Lady Macbeth’s
108
‘Macbeth': the witches' meeting on the beach
face), Polanski has eschewed ornate visual effects
to concentrate instead on the continuity of
medieval life, with details of social convention
(the maidservants strewing dried flowers in the
guest room before Duncan’s arrival) and formal
entertainment (bear-baiting, dancing). It is the
stability of the social life evoked in these scenes
that the Macbeths seem to violate, and the use of
speeded-up film in Duncan’s murder indicates
how far their crime signifies a disruption of the
natural rhythm of life.
The strength of the film is that it works
concurrently on both a naturalistic and a
psychological plane. Macbeth is a play of
paradoxes, concerned with what is real and what
is illusory—the role-playing of the Macbeths,
the ambiguity of the play’s supernatural mani¬
festations, the witches’ chop-logic predictions
which ‘cannot’, but do, come true—and
Polanski has built his film on a correspondingly
ambivalent structure. The recurring long shot of
Macbeth’s castle, a gaunt rock projecting from
an open plain, suggests at once its strength and
its isolation and provides a metaphor for
Macbeth’s dilemma—he is most vulnerable
when most powerful, most alone when most
flattered and lorded.
Working on two simultaneous levels of reality,
the film also blurs the theatrical line between
dialogue and soliloquy, ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ drama.
The speech ‘If it were done when *tis done* is
cut into two pans, the first delivered as a voice-
off interior monologue, Macbeth staring moodily
across the banquet table while his wife and
Duncan chatter at his side, the second half
‘thought’ and half spoken aloud by Macbeth as
he paces the castle gallery after deserting the
banquet. In this framework, where inner and
outer experience merge and nothing can be
patly dismissed as ‘illusory’, it is appropriate
enough that Macbeth’s dagger hangs garishly
and palpably in the air (prompting critics to
complain of Walt Disney crudity), and that the
witches whom Macbeth describes as vanishing
‘into the air* are in fact seen to scuttle down
steps into an underground meeting-place.
The film’s general determination to de¬
mystify makes its sporadic eruptions into
violence or dream all the more telling. Duncan’s
murder is a flurry of rapidly intercut shots (knife
piercing throat, crown spinning to floor), and
the vision of the future shown Macbeth by the
witches provides a swift, disorienting sequence
of incongruous images linked by the shots of a
bubbling cauldron. In deliberate contrast, the
climactic fight between Macbeth and Macduff
becomes a slow, clumsy and fatalistic affair,
illustrating not a violation of the natural order
but the pragmatic destruction of a usurper.
Violence, though seen as integral to the society
Macbeth portrays, is thus also seen as having
two sides—the deranged subversive and the
moral punitive. In so far as this distinction
predicates the existence of a natural order,
serving as the criterion for moral judgment, the
film tends to stress the play’s medieval aspect;
and the chief criticism one could raise is that
Polanski’s Macbeth , while re-creating the moral
and social feel of the period, does not sufficiently
illuminate the play for our own times.
There are other reservations. The changes
that Polanski and Kenneth Tynan have made to
Shakespeare’s original all have a slightly
gratuitous air. Ross has been transformed from
an anonymous nobleman to an archetypal time¬
server, changing sides according to the way the
political wind blows; in his second visit to the
witches Macbeth stumbles upon an assembled
coven of naked hags; in a brief and ominous
epilogue, we see Donalbain (mysteriously
endowed with a limp throughout the film)
approaching the witches* refuge on foot. All
these ideas serve to liven up the proceedings
without quite seeming fundamental to a new
version of the play, and it is the dynamic of a
committed interpretation that the film basically
misses.
Some of this enervation is reflected in the
performances. Jon Finch speaks the verse
competently but brings no real vigour or
emotional substance to the part of Macbeth.
Francesca Annis looks more promising, and
makes much of Lady Macbeth’s kittenish and
neurotic coaxings in the early scenes; but the
character’s abrupt transition from provocateuse
to insomniac has defeated most actresses, and in
Tynan’s heavily cut adaptation (a third of the
text has been excised) the part makes even less
sense than usual. A wealth of intelligence has
clearly gone into every detail of the film’s
mise-en-scbie , but there are times when the
missing qualities seem to be precisely those that
unified Polanski’s previous work—a sense of
the obsessional, the claustrophobic and the
grotesque.
NIGEL ANDREWS
Punishment Park
With Nixon’s China trip, and the November
election looming, it’s more than possible that
American military involvement in Vietnam will
be insignificant by the end of the year. Not so,
according to Peter Watkins. In his new film
the Vietnam war has escalated, with a corres¬
ponding upsurge of violent dissent. America is
shaken by sabotage, the prisons are overcrowded,
and in desperation the President has invoked
the McCarran Act and set up nationwide
detention camps, whence dissidents are hauled
before citizen tribunals and offered a choice
between prison and Punishment Park—a three-
day assault course across the desert in search of
the American flag. If you avoid capture by a
pursuit squad of police and National Guard,
freedom; if not, you serve your sentence. You
may not survive the blazing days and freezing
nights, and you may get picked off by trigger-
happy Guardsmen; what you don’t know,
though you might have guessed it, is that the
Stars and Stripes is an illusory haven. And all
this, Watkins says, is happening tomorrow,
yesterday, five years from now—‘It is also
happening today.*
The War Game was a projection into the not too
distant future, a loud-voiced warning of things
to come; Privilege was a fictional metaphor
for a future shock. With The Peace Game , and
now Punishment Park (The Other Cinema),
Watkins presents what he calls allegory in the
form of documentary. Angered, and not with¬
out justification, by the ‘critical intolerance
against my films’, Watkins hits back with ‘a
cinema of feeling, of direct confrontation with
ourselves.* For every damning critic’s ‘hyster¬
ical* or ‘obsessed’ he counters with ‘fear
syndrome*, ‘intellectual repression*, ‘a malaise
common to us all*. Well, if you pull the dog’s
tail, you’re asking to get bitten. In fact, Punish -
merit Park is easily the best of Watkins* cinema
pamphlets. As a film-maker he is not one to use
gentle persuasion if he can shout instead, and
‘obsessed’ he may well be. But after so much
anodyne posturing in the commercial cinema
of late, a kick in the guts may be what we need.
This, at least, is how Watkins sees it, and like
his other films Punishment Park is a frontal
assault on the senses. He describes the method
as a fusion of realism and expressionism. As the
film jolts along, lurching between one group of
dissidents in the desert and another arraigned
before the tribunal, a simulated reality spirals
into nightmare. The link to the world outside
the desert is the media, British and German
television teams who shadow the desert fugitives
and zoom in on the highlights of the tribunal.
The desert television crew, in the unseen voice
of an interviewer/director, stands its distance
only until they are involved in the violence to
the extent of trying to intervene (‘Oh, God,
stop! Cut the camera,’ screams the interviewer
as the National Guard mows down a helpless
quartet), thus neatly answering familiar doubts
about the emotive neutrality of front-line
television reporters; while at the same time, of
course, raising even more awkward questions
about the distance between the television unit
we’re assumed to be watching and Watkins’
own team recording them. What we have, in
fact, is the familiar Watkins double-take. We’re
being asked to believe what we know to be
faked, while simultaneously being persuaded
that it isn’t faked. Not for the first time in a
Watkins film, form and content arc at once,
and disturbingly, interdependent and in opposi¬
tion. The telephoto lens repeatedly blurs the
image, and it’s more than just a heat haze. It’s a
method that is sometimes self-defeating, forcing
a gap between film and audience (there’s no
disguising, finally, that the thing is faked); but
it’s also a method that grips you by the throat.
This time, at least, the tone—shrill, un¬
leavened by any distancing evaluation—is less
alienating because more consistent. There are as
usual too many barbs for the audience to catch
on, things like the doom-laden off-camera voice
which periodically intones temperature levels
and the facts of dehydration. But in detail at
least we can believe what we see, even when
we’re troubled by the larger scheme. The
reality of the American generational polarity is
graphically registered. Paranoia straddles the
fence, in the harassed faces of the tribunal
members (housewife, senator, sociologist and so
on) as much as in the ranting, self-pitying
obstinacy of the accused. Their defence counsel
makes allusion to Hitler and in the same breath
calls his clients ‘these strange and excluded
people’; interviews with the tribunal during an
alfresco lunch break elicit remarks about ‘more
spank and less Spock in America’. The pursuit
team, whose cynical captain demonstrates their
lethal weapons with an ice-cold lack of emotion,
are just doing their job and anxious to do it well,
even if it means a pimply 18-year-old trainee
weeping into camera that his trigger pulled by
accident. Everybody mouthes the conditioned
platitudes of Middle and disaffected America.
If there was ever a communicating wire, it’s
been cut clean through, a point made crystal
clear by the woman committee member’s
hysterical assault (‘You’re schizophrenic, you
should be locked up*) on a girl who might be her
own. Written into the faces on both sides of
the table is fear and incomprehension, and long
since the end of the dialogue.
Violence, someone says, is the only thing that
will provoke a reaction. And as a car radio picks
up a Nixon address to ‘forward-looking
Americans’, the soundtrack stutters with gun¬
fire, screaming jets and unimaginable electronic
noise. Watkins* future is predicated on a present
imperfect, which is reasonable and right. What
is less clear, and it’s around the background
reverberations that doubts begin to assert them¬
selves, is the precise context for this collision
course. The desert game, like the real
game, makes no distinction between violent
militant and pacifist reasoner, but we’re given
no indication of particular circumstances which
caused this generality. Quite apart from the
worrying certainty that if present speculation
is future fact, then any speculation is valid in
Watkins* terms, there’s a nagging lack of
documentation behind the film’s persuasive
specifics. What exactly is that war cacophony on
the soundtrack? Why haven’t the dissidents
realised that Punishment Park is a frame-up
(the news would surely have filtered through) ?
Fugitives in the desert in *Punishment Park *
Why put your trust in the American flag if your
one aim is to destroy all it stands for? More
seriously, what is this third alternative (an
amnesty pledge) we’re suddenly introduced to
near the end, and why on earth doesn’t someone
take it ? And yet more seriously, what exactly are
those television crews doing in the desert ? If
the coverage is going out on NBC, as the inter¬
viewer tells the captain when things are getting
out of hand, are we to assume that NBC is still
allowed to transmit what can only be poten¬
tially subversive material ? If not now, as
Watkins keeps insisting, then certainly not in
this future, where repression would long since
have silenced the media as even neutral
commentator.
As previously, verisimilitude falters when one
starts to question the general credibility of
Watkins’ hypothesis. If this is an allegory, then
its very real surface mitigates against its ac¬
ceptance as such. And the more questions one
asks, the larger the credibility gap. I don’t think
it’s valid to attack Watkins (as many have done)
for being a romantic masochist. The general
malaise which he sees leading to Punishment
Park is there for all to see; and as he says, any¬
one who doesn’t see it is trapped by the game.
It’s just that some people don’t see a bullet in
the desert as the only end of the road. Watkins
says we’re losing touch with reality, which is
why his film is an allegory. What he hasn’t seen,
or won’t admit, is that other side of the reality
which can offer an alternative possibility to his
nightmare future. Oddly, though perhaps
characteristically, he doesn’t see this most
political of films as being political.
DAVID WILSON
Modern Times
Critics are notoriously unwilling to call a master¬
piece a masterpiece in case they wake up with
red faces a week later to discover that it is
nothing of the sort. Even allowing for critical
caution, though, contemporary writers were
out-of-the-ordinarily churlish about Modern
Times , to judge from some of the nine reviews
published in Alistair Cooke’s recently reprinted
Garbo and the Night Watchmen. The exceptions
were Robert Forsythe (alias Kyle Crichton),
who liked it for some slightly irrelevant leftist
reasons; and Graham Greene, who had less
109
timidity than most when it came to naming
masterpieces.
The rest of them complained in the same
breath that Chaplin had dared to change—had
been flattered into seeing himself as a mystic
rather than a clown and had taken the little man
out of his proper element, into the modern world
—and that he had not changed; that his pictures
were still flatly lit and cut in the fashion of 1914;
that his evasion of sound by the use of schmaltzy
music and archaic sub-titles was an equal blend
of cowardice and gall; that in any case the film
was at best a retrospective anthology of his
favourite old gags.
After thirty-six years all this seems a far-off
whimpering, while the film begins to look,
with all its faults, something like a masterpiece.
Certainly it has done nothing but improve
since the last time it came round, seventeen
years ago. With the years the archaic techniques
which seemed so affronting in 1936 have melted
into a kind of timelessness. In any case, you feel,
Chaplin knew very well what he was doing.
There is every sign that he consciously recognised
this was the last appearance of The Tramp,
twenty-two years after his first appearance at
Keystone in January, 1914. The optimistic end
—for the first time Chaplin trots off towards
the sunset and distant horizons not alone but in
company with the girl, won at last—taken with
the clown’s ultimate discovery of a voice, gave
the film an air of finality. In his next film
Chaplin would be the Great Dictator and in the
next, Verdoux. This was The Tramp’s last fling
and his last look at the world.
It is, as the critics in 1936 pointed out, a
different world from the clapboard fences and
dirt roads of rural California in the old slapstick
shorts; the alleys which in Chaplin’s films
always took on a look of Victorian London. It is
a world whose worries—industrial regimentation,
strikes, riots, demonstrations, police brutality,
drugs, urban pollution, the inhuman rigidity of
bureaucratic social organisations—seem, oddly
enough, even more contemporary now than in the
Depression years when the film was made. But
then, one of the qualities of Chaplin which now
becomes clearer with this rediscovery of Modern
Timesy is the way he has of existing outside time.
Just as the themes are still relevant to us, thirty-
six years on, so the characters and the sentiments
reach back to the nineteenth century. When he
speaks of poverty and vagrancy, or shows the
orphanage men taking children from a slum
home, or shapes his vision of Paulette Goddard’s
sharp little waif, you sense acute memories
of the long ago reality of Chaplin’s hard and
formative boyhood. When towards the end he
performs his great set-piece, the gibberish
version of ‘Titine’, we see instantly and beauti¬
fully resurrected all the vitality and absurdity
and incomparable techniques of the English
music hall in which Chaplin was bred, and
acquired the skills of comedy.
What skills they are, too. There is no sense at
all in pursuing the old comparisons with Keaton,
because the two comedians were, as we see most
clearly here, poles apart. All they had in common
was the chosen trade of creating laughter, and
the impeccable command of mimetic technique.
Keaton’s was an art of understatement, of
concealment; Chaplin’s of virtuosity and
display. Keaton in his great set-pieces always
gave the impression of a man caught up in
irresistible forces of nature (a whirlwind, flood,
avalanche, or merely the force of gravity) and
simply pitting his wit and physique against
them. Chaplin’s are brilliant, pyrotechnic
exhibitions of theatrical pantomime. Keaton
was primarily an actor; so was Chaplin (and on
occasions a great one too), but he was first and
foremost a performer —‘the finest goddam ballet
dancer in the business,’ as W. C. Fields, intend¬
ing deadly insult, called him.
The conveyor belt sequence which opens the
film is a masterpiece of choreography. Chaplin
is the man who simultaneously tightens two
nuts on each of an endless series of mysterious
components as they pass inexorably by him. A
moment’s inattention to brush away a fly causes
chaos throughout the production line; and when
finally he runs berserk it is to dance his way into
a mad ballet, demonically attacking with
spanners anything that looks amenable to
tightening, including the bodice buttons of a
busty lady passing by. There are similar impec¬
cable compositions of mime and movement in
the scene where, having inadvertently swal¬
lowed an elephant dose of joy-powder, he
pirouettes out of the prison mess in the wake
of a line of frog-marching convicts; and in the
sequence where he roller-skates, blindfold, on
the brink of an abyss—which hasn’t much to do
with the story, but is divine.
It is no use pretending that Chaplin is not a
great clown. Modem Times was the film that
began his eclipse with the intellectual critics,
who complained that he had begun to take him¬
self as seriously as some of them (by right, that
is, as intellectuals) had done; that he was for¬
getting his job as an entertainer and fancying
himself as a philosopher. But, looking at it now.
nobody could really confuse with philosophy
these encounters of his Tramp with circum¬
stances of modem life as self-evident as were
the huge jealous husbands, angry matrons and
other hazards of the world where Keystone
comedy lived. Even when he came on to
Verdoux and the idea of the contrast between
private and official murder, the notion had the
simple grandeur of comedy rather than any of the
subtlety of philosophy. He never went beyond
the clown’s true function of holding up to
nature a distorting mirror. Sometimes, of
course, the reflections were illuminated with
something like genius. It will always remain
mysterious whether the famous scene where
Charlie helpfully picks up a red warning flag
which has fallen off a lorry, and runs after it,
unaware that a mass demonstration has formed
up behind him, is comedy or tragedy: either
way it is an epic of a man as victim of his fate.
DAVID ROBINSON
The Decameron
At the end of the thirteenth century, Giotto
took the almost heretical step of pioneering a
naturalistic style to replace early medieval
formalism in religious painting, and was able to
transform, as a result, the city of Florence, the
home town of Giovanni Boccaccio. With glee¬
ful logic, Pasolini has taken the part of Giotto
for himself in The Decameron (United Artists),
playing him as a near-demented autocrat who
uses faces from the market-place as inspiration
for his fresco at Santa Chiara. Pasolini too has
broken with some traditions in his time, explored
the Holy City with Marxist feet, sung the
praises of the street people, shown the un-
showable and been well rewarded for it. Here,
the director of The Gospel According to St.
Matthew characteristically scratches his head
while everyone else is saying grace, and finally
studies his completed work with the query
‘Why produce a work of an when it’s so much
nicer just to dream about it ?’ At these words,
briskly slamming itself shut, The Decameron
leaves us to grapple with various interpreta¬
tions—for example, that to begin an enjoyable
task is more pleasant than to complete it, that
nothing ever turns out as expected, that the
artist in general (and Pasolini in particular) is
never satisfied with what he has achieved.
Since Pasolini has always delighted in the
contradictory, it isn’t too surprising that The
Decameron is open to each of these approaches:
the director plainly enjoyed himself while
making it, the mood is a startling change from
everything he has done'since Uccellacci e Uccel-
lini, yet the film is not entirely a success and
one suspects that Pasolini knew it.
Boccaccio’s hundred stories were shared
between ten narrators during their flight from
the plague. Pasolini has selected eight of the
stories plus the anecdote about Giotto (a ninth
is credited but was later deleted from the film)
and has dispensed with narration, instead using
Franco Citti to convey some measure of con¬
tinuity for the first half and himself for the
second. That this device doesn’t really work is
mainly the fault of the editing, which, as with
Theorem and Pigsty , has no time to waste on
fades or dissolves but hustles The Decameron
along at a brutal speed. With the earlier films
this scalpel-sharp pruning was an advantage,
but with Boccaccio’s more meditative pace and
well-savoured humour it all too often obscures
the joke by understatement—we’re well into
each new story before we realise there’s to be
no more of the previous item.
The pace also curtails some of Pasolini’s
most extravagantly staged sequences, such as
Giotto’s vision of the Day of Judgment, or the
abrupt and muddled parade of religious fanatics
that apparently sets the scene for Ciappalletto’s
arrival at a northern town on a debt-collecting
mission. To add to the confusion, Pasolini’s
no
Twiggy in ‘The Boy Friend*
performers aren’t always at their best; Ninetto
Davoli is allowed too much open-mouthed
stupefaction, while Franco Citti, very much
the big star these days, looks far too well-
preserved to be plausibly on his death-bed.
And although the faces of the Neapolitan non¬
actors are marvellously misshapen (with a
horrific display of dental neglect), their awk¬
ward self-consciousness looks disappointingly
genuine. What should have been a simple and
spirited sexuality in the Boccaccio manner often
has, on the contrary, the embarrassed air of
contrivance.
Surface blemishes apart, however. The
Decameron is so consistent with the familiar
Pasolini outlook that one begins to see how
Chaucer too will have attracted the director of
Pigsty. Like Chaucer, whom he probably met
and who certainly borrowed some of his stories,
Boccaccio’s themes were hypocrisy, betrayal
and gullibility; his clerics were forever on the
make, his young lovers perpetually gratifying
their passions, his peasants endlessly submitting
to deceit and usury. Pasolini’s choices perfectly
illustrate Boccaccio’s range—the man who
becomes a saint by the simple process of lying
outrageously for his last Confession, the nunnery
that takes full advantage of its well-endowed
gardener, the priest who gives a practical
demonstration of how his host’s wife might be
turned into a mare, the girl whose brothers
commit murder as revenge for her willing
adultery. The most outrageous story—not in
what it shows but in what it says—is kept to
the last: two friends vow that whoever dies
first will return to tell the other what the next
world is like, and when the survivor is duly
visited he receives with delight and prompt
action the news that sexual indulgence, con¬
trary to the Church’s view, is not regarded in
Heaven as sinful. That Boccaccio was able to
get away with such irreverence is surprising
enough, but nothing like as incredible as the
fact that 600 years later so little has changed
that Pasolini can still use it as a scandalous
punch-line.
Paradoxically, it is through the lack of inhibi¬
tion that The Decameron is at its most convincing
as a reconstruction of the Duecetito period. The
full frontals and the unmistakable couplings
seem an attractive and natural part of the
uproarious and uncomplicated lives that Pasolini
shows us through the spectacular colours of
Tonino Delli Colli’s photography. As with
Oedipus Rex , it is as if he had found a medieval
community miraculously untouched and filmed
it as it stood, the crumbling colonnades, the
sparse furnishings, the lean countryside, the
roughly functional costumes. Occasionally The
Decameron halts on a face that one would swear
only the Renaissance had known, like that of
Maria Agnelli who plays Lizabetta in the cur¬
tailed story of the girl who hides her lover’s
head in a pot of basil. For its glimpses of this
almost alien world, as well as for its sense of
fun, The Decameron can be made welcome as an
indication of the extension of Pasolini’s skill.
Sad that it also indicates the extent of his
weaknesses.
PHILIP STRICK
Kotch
First expectations of how Jack Lemmon’s
distinctive personality as an actor will emerge in
his first feature as director are somewhat
disappointed by Kotch (Cinerama). The familiar
extremes of that personality—a wishfully blind
sentimentality and a feverish irascibility turning
to bitterness—seem to have been dissolved in a
comedy that is consistently cosy and amiable.
Meandering along a path whose end is fairly
clear from the start, the film’s comic invention
is of a limited and conventional sort, but its
observation of character and other small,
pleasurable discoveries made along the way are
unusually alive and leaven the subject—the
personal reintegration of two misfits—with a
range of nuances. Any attempt to define Kotch
has to take account of the fact that it is almost
wholly a vehicle for Walter Matthau, that it is
only tenuously connected with the problems
of old age, and that the threatened sentimen¬
tality of the ‘odd couple’ relationship between
an unwanted old man and an unwed pregnant
teenager is kept firmly bottled, only to be un¬
corked briefly in the film’s final minutes.
‘Kotch* is Joseph P. Kotcher, a widowed
septuagenarian whose increasingly vague and
eccentric behaviour—emerging reluctantly from
his enjoyment of amplified stereo and his own
wandering train of thought to explain to a
hostile mother that his patting of little girls*
bottoms in the park is not the beginning of
senile perversion but a time-honoured and
sportsmanlike form of encouragement—is
driving his daughter-in-law to distraction and
an assortment of sedatives. Foiling an attempt
to have him interned in an old people’s home
by proving he has more wit than their ‘recrea¬
tional structures’ and ink-blot tests can allow
for, Kotch takes off on his own, befriends Erica
Herzenstiel (Deborah Winters), the family’s
ex-baby-sitter whose unwanted pregnancy has
left her bewildered but determinedly in¬
dependent, and eventually does the honours as
midwife in a roadside ladies’ room.
There is a curious split in Matthau’s perform¬
ance that somehow manages to make Kotch
completely credible on two different levels.
The mannerisms and general air of old age—
dawdling, discursive conversation, a benignly
abstracted expression and an elastic-limbed
gait—are thoroughly duplicated. But the still
active mind beneath it all operates on a mixture
of good-natured egoism and mocking unconcern
that is little different from Matthau’s previous
roles, whose slumbering charm always indicated
a character grown old and world-weary before
his time. Matthau’s traditional other half, the
various Jack Lemmon impersonations of a
harassed, excitable figure of finicky scruples,
has been dispersed through a succession of
minor characters—most clearly Kotch’s im¬
mediate family, but including the peripheral
appearance of Erica’s brother, who turns up at
the motel with the adoption papers for Erica’s
imminent child, complains bitterly about the
frustrations of his job, and then roars off back
into the desert. In another way, this theoretically
absent character has been transformed in the
girl herself. Erica accepts the old man’s help
gratefully but with a certain reserve, and the
fact that their attitudes and preoccupations
remain worlds apart helps maintain an edgy,
tentative feeling to their relationship and grace¬
fully plays down its most obvious aspect—their
loneliness and mutual need.
Contributing to this air of a delicately balanced
security is the film’s roving through a variety of
landscapes and a succession of domestic settings.
Following Erica’s impulsive comings and
goings, and Kotch’s bemused but patient trek
in search of independence, Lemmon has
included a much more convincing picture of
motel civilisation than seemed to be possible in
the film version of Lolita ; while at the same
time neatly transferring this particular senior
citizen into the dislocated, homeless world of a
younger generation.
RICHARD COMBS
The Boy Friend
As his ostensible subject has shifted from
Lawrence’s Midlands to Tchaikovsky’s Moscow,
to Huxley’s Loudun, it’s become apparent that,
in his loudly trumpeted disrespect for classical
values, Ken Russell consistently approaches
his source material as a tattered poster upon
which to scrawl those outsized and eye-catching
graffiti that pass for an auteur's signature among
less discerning critics of the Common Market
countries.
Which is not to dispute Russell’s status as an
auteur (indeed, the very narrowness of his
imaginative horizons seems a defiant reductio ad
absurdum of the auteur theory), but rather to
reproach him for the relentless weight with
which he imposes his all-effacing mark upon the
most disparate material. In his case, the in¬
termediary is the message. Time and again, it
seems, he mistakes his distorting mirror for a
window on the world. Filtered through the
looking glass, diverse landscapes and assorted
sensibilities take on an inflexible sameness—a
comic-strip frieze in which petty-minded
puppets roll their bulging eyeballs to cavort in
clashing costumes through gaudy decors. In a
uniquely perverse process, his source material
is first trivialised, then—in its newly impover¬
ished form—inflated to epic proportions.
Ill
Clint Eastwood in ‘Dirty Harry *
The latest casualty in this looking-glass war
is Sandy Wilson’s 1953 musical, The Boy
Friend , an affectionately nostalgic piece, equally
lacking in malice and epic ambition, involving
some pretty melodies and a tiny orchestra: a
consciously minor-key reaction to the succes¬
sion of brash American shows that were
invading the London stage at the time. True to
form, Russell begins by filming not the work
itself, but a ragged repertory production of it.
This device provides a pretext for having most
of the numbers sung out of tune and enables
Russell, as cindaste , to impose his caricatural
vision by dwelling on the grotesque hyperboles
of theatrical make-up (thereby eclipsing the
fragile dignity of Sandy Wilson’s characters in
the monstrous indignity of his own provincial
troupers).
By setting this tatty production in some ill-
defined twilight zone between the Twenties
and Thirties, Russell further robs The Boy
Friend of its nostalgia, and leaves it looking
simply anachronistic. (A characteristic joke is
the casting of the well-endowed Barbara
Windsor as a flapperish maid, forever squirming
in her excessively short shift.) Whether they
are on stage or off, we are invited to sneer at his
puppet characters, and the price asked for our
smugness is admiration for the puppet-master
himself. For having demolished a charming
minor work, Russell sets out to resuscitate it as
a spectacular extravaganza. As the scenery falls
over, the chorus dance out of time and the
understudy dries up, the frustrated Portsmouth
producer (Max Adrian dressed as Noel Coward)
conjures up the flashy production he would like
to have staged, while in the audience, visiting
Hollywood director De Thrill—dressed like a
Chicago gangster, but in his mind’s eye kitted
out as von Sternberg—dreams of filming the
entire show Busby Berkeley style.
The result is an infuriatingly discordant
mosaic, in which the large, brassy orchestrations
wage a war of nerves on the delicate times, as
rival artistic styles compete for our attention.
In much the same way as his repertory cast
resort to escalating outrages in their attempts to
upstage one another and attract De Thrill’s
attention, Russell’s musical numbers succeed
one another like entrants in a beauty contest,
each soliciting admiration while no less trans¬
parently revealing the model she aspires to
emulate. But Russell’s versatility proves a poor
substitute for sensitivity, just as his pastiches
prove a poor substitute for Busby Berkeley’s
originals. Divorced from any temporal context,
his brightly coloured images achieve no reson¬
ance, appearing merely as expensive doodles.
Thus in one typical conjunction, ‘A Room in
Bloomsbury* is transformed, for no obvious
reason, first into a fantasy stage set with giant
chairs and tables, then into a kind of leprechauns’
school outing, as myriad pixies and elves
disport themselves on gigantic toadstools.
But there is one element in Ken Russell’s The
Boy Friend (MGM-EMI) that really works,
and that is Twiggy, cast as the bespectacled
understudy who steps into the lead when the
star (Glenda Jackson, irritably shushing the
audience as they applaud her substitute) sprains
her ankle. Since the plot has her rushed on to
the stage before she can grab the greasepaint,
Twiggy is spared the disfiguring effects of
Russell’s theatrical make-up, and her natural
beauty (which has no need of the surrounding
ugliness to set it off) is strong enough to survive
even the director’s practice of placing his camera
dangerously near to his performers’ larynxes.
Since she is not supposed to be playing an
actress, she is also excused from the histrionic
excesses of the rest of the cast and allowed to
proceed with a welcome, and recognisably
human, naturalism. She has a clear, sweet voice
that restores the songs to some of their original
innocence, and serves as a wistful reminder of
just how much nicer—and quieter—the stage
version was.
JAN DAWSON
Dirty Harry
After his teasingly attractive venture through
the looking-glass into Tennessee Williams
country with The Beguiled , Don Siegel returns
to his own terra firma in Dirty Harry (Columbia-
Wamer), yet another tale of a tough cop who
rides roughshod over rules and principles to
get his man. The place is San Francisco, with
dark alleys and spotless skyscrapers rubbing
unlikely shoulders in Bruce Surtees’ admirable
photography, and a maniac killer holding the
city at bay, casually picking off his victims and
announcing the next target—‘a nigger or a
Catholic priest’—as he waits for a decision on
whether his ransom demand is to be met. A
helicopter circles overhead, checking the high,
flat-topped buildings, each picketed by an
armed guard. Only one is left unguarded as a
temptation to the mad sniper, and Detective
Inspector Callahan, known as Dirty Harry (Clint
Eastwood), moves in for the kill.
The main difference from Madigan or Coogan's
Bluffs apart from the fact that the action is kept
tautly strung to the end instead of sagging into
moralising asides, is that this time Siegel and
his scriptwriters make no bones about their
endorsement of the hero’s high-handed actions.
In fact they go rather out of their way to give
Dirty Harry their seal of approval by having
the camera, in the opening sequence, pan
reverently down the roll of honour of San
Francisco policemen who have lost their lives
in the line of duty. We then watch him spring
into action to foil an armed robbery (as neatly
choreographed a gunfight as you are likely to
see this side of Ford), swing high up on a
fireman’s ladder to talk down a suicide jumper,
and stake his own life by walking into an ambush
in a bid to trap the killer. He succeeds, only to
find that legal red tape is on the side of the
criminal, who not only murders and rapes but
thoroughly enjoys it, and who will go free
because his rights have been infringed.
Legally speaking there are several yawning
loopholes hereabouts, but the film makes its
point forcefully—the same one Chandler’s Lt.
Christy French was grumbling about nearly
twenty-five years ago in The Little Sister: ‘It’s
like this with us, baby. We’re coppers and
everybody hates our guts. . . Nothing we do is
right, not ever. Not once. If we get a confession,
we beat it out of the guy, they say, and some
shyster calls us Gestapo.. .* In Clint Eastwood’s
excellent performance, guarded, solitary, self-
assured, Callahan comes over as almost the
perfect cop, one who can afford to shoot first
and ask questions afterwards because he knows ,
he can read the signs as clearly as an Indian on
the trail, and he is right. The pity of it is that
the film, not content to leave it at that, rams
its point home (the equivalent of Gestapo
nowadays is pig) by making the ‘victim* of
Dirty Harry’s ‘Fascist* attentions not merely a
snarling sadist but a long-haired hippie who
sports a peace symbol belt-buckle. It looks
suspiciously as though, with The French
Connection as another exhibit, the police of
America are looking to the cinema to polish up
their tarnished image, just as the various
professions used to do in Hollywood’s halcyon
days.
Thematically, in fact. Dirty Harry could do
with a touch of self-doubt, an acknowledgment
along the lines of Touch of Evil that a man can
act wrongly for the right reasons. Considered
purely as a thriller, however, it is Siegel’s best
in years: the killer (a fine, edgy performance by
Andy Robinson) casually letting his sights stray
over the people strolling in the gardens below,
suddenly panicking as his chosen victim
momentarily disappears, then grinning in
anticipation as the little negro queer in the
purple poncho reappears and obligingly sits
down on a bench; the weird treasure hunt,
with the life of a girl hostage as stake, from
phone booth to phone booth all over the city as
Callahan desperately follows the killer’s whim¬
sical instructions on how to deliver the ransom
money; the silent, echoing park where Callahan
and the killer finally meet at the foot of a huge
stone cross, and where the latter, acknowledging
a stab wound with a wild, feral cry, bounds off
like an animal into the jungle. As so often,
though, the colour is a mistake: dark and
nocturnal, Dirty Harry cries out for black and
white.
TOM MILNE
Millhouse: A White Comedy
The best way to show off your political oppo¬
nent as an ass is to hire a hall for him. That’s
what Millhouse: A White Comedy is about—
the Emperor without a stitch on. No politician
could survive Emile de Antonio’s collage of old
112
television and movie footage. We all, and poli¬
ticians more than anyone, would appear ridi¬
culous or stupid or evil if someone were to edit
our worst moments into a full-length public
exhibition. Richard Nixon has had much more
than his share of such moments. But, says de
Antonio, ‘If all this film does is pander to your
Nixon prejudices, then the film is a failure.’
There is pandering footage inserted in this
film, but de Antonio has something else in mind.
In each of his major documentaries— Point of
Order , Rush to Judgment and In the Year of the
Pig —he has devoted himself to ripping away
the veils to expose a major American institution:
the U.S. Senate, the FBI and the Warren
Commission, the U.S. Government’s foreign
policy apparatus. In Millhouse de Antonio is
after no less than the entire traditional political
process. The film is ‘not at all a personal attack
on Nixon,* de Antonio told me in an interview
for Film Quarterly (Fall, 1971), though it is
indeed personal. ‘The film attacks the System,
the credibility of the System, by focusing on the
obvious and perfect symbol for that System.’
Though the collage effect seems more hastily
patched together than in de Antonio’s other
films—a bit of sloppiness that just stops it from
emerging as the cinematic equivalent to John
dos Passos’ famous collage novel, U.S.A .—
Millhouse does have an artistic cohesiveness, a
tough political core, and even a beginning-
middle-end format.
The Beginning. Nixon’s real middle name is
spelled Milhous: de Antonio invented a deli¬
berate misspelling, he said, both to resonate
some fiction-like ambiguity (silly and unneces¬
sary), and to suggest references to the tradi¬
tional political mill, the White House, the old
grinding mill-house out of America’s early past.
The ‘white comedy* subtitle relates also to the
White Anglo Saxon Protestant nature of the
Nixon administration and constituency. (Almost
never in this 25-year chronology does one see a
Negro.)
In the opening moments of the film, we see a
literal ‘Making of the President’, as technicians in
Mme. Tussaud’s wax museum put the finishing
touches to Nixon. As they adjust his head, comb
his hair, fix his tie, the audience laughs since
Nixon does indeed come across as devoid of
human emotion. Some critics have called this
footage a cheap shot—the same joke could be
played with the wax images of Lincoln, Washing¬
ton, FDR, and what would the film-maker be
saying? There is, however, a justification for this
footage other than the easy titters it generates.
The opening editing ‘trick’ takes on political
meaning as the film progresses: throughout the
film de Antonio has assembled footage of the
real-life Nixon exactly duplicating the wax-pose.
Also, at one point he uses footage of the then
Premier Ky—our man (nequin) in Saigon—shot
from precisely the same angle as the Nixon
image in the museum. (Mrs. Nixon appears to
be on loan from Mme. Tussaud throughout
the film.)
The Middle. Nixon has provided the American
political audience with many memorable scenes
and soliloquies—some comic, some tragic, some
simply in abominable taste—and they’re all
here in Millhouse. For the young, who did not
have the privilege of living through some of the
more choice moments of Nixon’s early political
life, the man on the screen is merely a bad
comedian; albeit a dangerous one. To those who
can recall aspects of his rise to power, the film is
an unfunny reminder that what Nixon represents
is an unusually successful political style which
preys upon the fears, myths and insecurities of a
willingly misled body politic.
Here is Nixon addressing a group of Republi¬
can supporters in his home town of Whittier,
California: ‘There used to be orange groves
here, lemon groves, avocado trees,* he says,
with a sweep of his arm. ‘Now they’re gone—
replaced by homes, buildings, industry. That’s
progress! That’s America!’ Or Nixon urging
the death penalty for those who deal in drugs;
or Nixon’s famous ‘Checkers’ speech; or his
press conference after he lost the California
governorship in 1962 when, in a moment of
rare emotion, he told reporters, ‘Well, you won’t
have Nixon to kick around any more because,
gentlemen, this is my last press conference’; or
Nixon telling Khrushchev in the famous
‘kitchen debate’ that the U.S. will emerge
victorious in the Cold War because America
can produce more and better TV sets (Khrush¬
chev gets the translation and rolls his eyes in
disbelief); or Nixon campaigning to end the
war in Korea and saying all those things we wish
he would say about Vietnam during his own
Presidency; or Nixon reportedly referring to
himself as ‘the egghead of the Republican
Party*; or Nixon calling Hubert Humphrey ‘a
dedicated radical*; or Nixon, with his mouth
slightly open in shocked surprise, watching a
go-go dancer wiggle her equipment mere
inches from his face at a White House reception.
It’s all there.
De Antonio, as usual, has culled these gems
from the abandoned mines of old television and
movie footage. In addition, he did some inter¬
viewing on his own, particularly of respected
journalists who have covered Nixon over the
years: Jules Witcover, author of The Resurrection
of Richard Nixon , columnist Jack Anderson,
editor James Wechsler, and, most importantly,
Joe McGinniss, author of The Selling of the
President , the book which describes how the
image of the ‘New Nixon’ was forged during
the 1968 television campaign. During that race,
Nixon often broadcast what appeared to be
unrehearsed, spontaneous press conferences.
De Antonio shows footage of the studio warm¬
up man, while the voice of McGinniss describes
how the carefully selected audience was coached
to respond to Nixon’s remarks.
De Antonio also went back to Nixon’s home
town to interview the President’s college
sweetheart. Her remarks are simple and revela¬
tory. Though asked several times to recall
anecdotes about the young Nixon, she can’t—
a lack which speaks volumes. However, one of
the future President’s early political campaigns
is described. Nixon was running for student
body president at Whittier College on a pledge
to fight for the right to have dances—a popular
issue with the students which he himself did
not favour. But that’s where the votes were, and
he won; a lesson he never forgot.
At several key points during this central
section of the film, where de Antonio attempts
chronologically to follow Nixon’s rise to power,
things get rather sketchy. By attempting to cover
so much ground—a little time here on the two
California congressional races in the mid-1940s,
and a little time there on Nixon’s vendetta
against Alger Hiss—de Antonio’s treatment
is inevitably much too fast and superficial, and
the film loses its hard-driving focus.
It is Nixon who is always at the centre of this
little comedy, but it is de Antonio’s essentially
anarchistic outrage at the American political
process in general that keeps intruding. There are
periodic intercuts of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon
Johnson, Herbert Hoover, Joe McCarthy,
J. Edgar Hoover—reminding us that they all
behave this way, some more smoothly than
others. There is a hilarious bit of editing (quite
different from anything de Antonio has done
in his previous films) that makes this type of
denunciation explicit. Nixon, with Eisenhower
seriously ill in hospital, tells the assembled
Republican delegates, ‘Let’s win this one for
Ike.’ There is an immediate cut to the famous
locker room scene in the Knute Rockne film
where Pat O’Brien asks his Notre Dame
football team to ‘Win this one for the Gipper.*
A pan shot to the hospital bed where the Gipper
lies swathed in bandages—it’s Ronald Reagan!
The End. Toward the close of the film, Nixon
is heard to say that the U.S. has no deep econo¬
mic interests in Vietnam, that the U.S. wants
nothing in Vietnam—at which point de Antonio
flashes a one-minute crawl up the screen of
about 40 major U.S. corporations that are
cleaning up in Vietnam. . .
The essential shallowness of the American
political tradition is made manifest in the last
shots in the film, when a proud President
Nixon introduces his Cabinet to a nation-wide
TV audience. Like good little boys who have
performed all the traditional American political
and business rituals, they stand like washed-out
Xerox copies—white, bland, pasty-faced, anony¬
mous, eager, interchangeably ambitious politi¬
cos. In the background, we feel we can almost
hear the whirr of the tired American machine
which grinds these products out.
Millhouse is a smash hit in the U.S., playing
to packed houses in at least 30 major cities. The
young are coming to laugh at this pitiable
spectacle; the old are grim with their
memories. The Democratic Party already
has approached de Antonio to purchase the
rights to the film, presumably to use the more
damaging segments in the coming Presidential
campaign. But de Antonio won’t sell. ‘I didn’t
make this film to elect Democrats,* he told me.
‘I made it to reveal the terrible comic theatre
that is American politics.*
BERNARD WEINER
Anti-Cinema: Fassbinder
from page 100
face value, and crime and the force of law
exist indistinguishably in the same figures.
Fassbinder’s self-criticism here is implicit
in the character of the killer’s neurotically
adoring younger brother, whom he bluntly
ignores when he visits his mother’s home,
where an old piano and a pinball machine
seem to be the only concessions to furniture.
His brother sees him shot down—in a long
slow motion dance of death—and then
virtually rapes the dead body as it lies
under the mocking gaze of row upon row of
station left-luggage lockers. An ironically
inapposite theme song in English (‘So much
tenderness’) repeats itself as Fassbinder
holds this last shot until it offends the
audience. It’s a ludicrous scene, and that is
Fassbinder’s point: the traditional American
gangster is finally dead, in a double sense,
and to try to revive him is folly.
Self-awareness, and its implied self-
criticism, is a key factor in Fassbinder’s
films. It is present again, along with the
caustic humour which often accompanies it,
in his most recent film Warning of a Holy
Whore , which I wrote about from Venice
last year. This film, in which a movie
director and his cast and unit indulge
emotional cannibalism as they wait stranded
by lack of money and equipment in a luxury
hotel, is Fassbinder’s most conscious
statement of the boundaries as well as the
far horizons of film as a form of self-expres¬
sion. Like all his films (I haven’t seen
Whity or Pioneers from Ingolstadt , but by
report they are characteristic), it reveals an
innovatory director very much alive to the
cinema’s capacity for deception. The holy
whore is the cinema. ■
113
BOOK
nnow
THE NEW DOCUMENTARY
IN ACTION: A Casebook in
Film Making
By Alan Rosenthal
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS,
$11.95
In this interesting series of inter¬
views with twenty-two documen¬
tary film-makers on both sides of
the Atlantic, there is much talk of
‘objectivity*, ‘manipulation’, ‘cen¬
sorship* and ‘truth*. Naturally
enough: the documentary film
concerns itself with portraits of
real life. But these are difficult
words to use. On the other hand,
everyone knows what he means by
them. This book is about how
difficult it is to convince others
you’re right.
Some quarters of the real world
under investigation know that they
have something to conceal which
even a hazy sketch of their activity
would show up: a lot of American
food monopolies, for instance,
simply wouldn’t talk to writer-
producer Jack Willis when he was
trying to expose their enormous
profits in Hard Times in the
Country. On the other hand,
others genuinely believe that a false
picture would be bound to emerge
from any filmed investigation and
so refuse to co-operate or, if they
have the power, suppress it. Among
villains here named are large
broadcasting corporations such as
CBS and the BBC, as well as
governments of all shades.
Some film-makers again are
convinced that they pursue the
facts objectively. Still others believe
no such pursuit is possible and that
only a strongly partisan case is the
honest one. To all of them the
words above naturally mean dif¬
ferent things. There is a further
confusion, not much stressed here,
which is that the ‘reality’ that
documentary may deal with is of
two quite distinct kinds. One
relates to facts such as ‘The Idaho
and Illinois Meat Packers United
made a pre-tax profit in 1969-70 of
842m.* (I quote an imaginary
example.) The second is a matter of
more conjecture: whether the
opinion or emotion or personal
situation represented is genuine or
contrived; and then whether it is,
even if genuine, entirely unaf¬
fected by the circumstances of
being filmed.
It’s worth clearing this amount
of air before thinking about the
experiences recorded in this book,
otherwise a general and fruitless
sense of grievance will emerge
against all the obstacles set in the
way of that modest and high-
114
minded spirit, the documentary
film-maker. In connection with
the last category noted above,
Allan King, who made A Married
Couple , is perfectly frank:
‘Billy and Antoinette in the film
are not Billy and Antoinette
Edwards, the couple who exist and
live at 323 Rushton Road. They are
characters, images on celluloid in a
film drama. To say that they are in
any other sense true, other than
being true to our own experience
of the world and people we have
known and ourselves, is philosophi¬
cal nonsense.’ King and his editor
Aria Saare admit that they freely
interfere with the chronology of the
events filmed: for example, one
affecting scene in which the wife
Antoinette sits on Billy’s lap weep¬
ing is so placed that the display of
emotion has a precise and telling
implication. It is untrue as a
historical record, though it may be
in a general way representative of
their relationship. The attitude in
which these decisions were ap¬
proached is seen clearly in this
answer from Aria Saare: ‘The
problem was where to put the car
fight. We juggled, I would say, for
a good six weeks, Allan and I. We
juggled the car fight; we had it
early, we had it late. . .*
Anyone who has ever made
films will recognise these words
only too well. But it’s not always
that the juggling is in the context
of a couple’s private life or of a
marriage which is possibly break¬
ing down. Where are the limits of
interference here and who is
recognising them ? If the Edwards
couple in the film are playing up to
the camera to the extent of not be¬
ing the real Edwards, then what’s
the point of the exercise ? (I’m not
saying there isn’t one—but what
is it ?) If they are playing for real,
then are we right to eavesdrop on
this private struggle? And how¬
ever hard the Edwards try to keep
their balance, is it not possible
that their relationship is not only
affected by the filming , but also by
the film ? That’s to say that,
subsequently seen, this record of
their marriage becomes, not only
for us, but for them too, the ‘true*
one and the one which will colour
their future ?
It has to be said that King and
his colleagues are unimpeachably
honest in their intentions and
devoted to what they regard as the
responsibilities of their job. The
same could be said for most of the
contributors to the book, although
some of them are operating in less
equivocal areas. It’s rather refresh¬
ing, for example, to come across
this question and its answer from
Jack Willis:
‘Q: In England, there is a certain
tradition of equal time for both
sides, and another concept of
always balancing an attack by a
defence. In Hard Times it’s all
attack.
willis: Sometimes there
aren’t two sides to an argument.
They’re cheating on us. They are
charging us too much money for
food. There’s no two sides to that.*
By the sound of it this is exactly
the kind of ‘prejudiced* work that
would have to be ‘balanced*
internally by a stout meat-packing
defence if it was offered to the BBC.
The BBC has a particular duty in
the direction of balance since it is
publicly financed, but the principle
of balance can be unimaginatively
(or indeed imaginatively) applied
to stifle strong opinions, especially
those you don’t agree with (i.e.
unbalanced ones). Peter Watkins
speaks up strongly here about the
way in which The War Game was
turned down by the BBC, but his
severest word is for the Home
Office who, having refused help
themselves, then instructed all
other civil organisations, includ¬
ing the police, to do the same.
Rosenthal seems marginally to
favour the BBC’s record in this
field to the Americans’; but he
makes an implied criticism of the
Corporation when he attributes
part of Cathy Come Home's success
to it being a play ‘that felt no need
for British balance. It condemned
unequivocally.*
‘Condemn unequivocally,’ then,
might seem the magic formula, but
the Loach/Gamett/Mercer Family
Life has been sternly criticised for
doing just that about National
Health treatment of mental
patients. What Loach might regard
as unequivocal his critics regard as
unfair, i.e. suppressive of parts of
the truth. Roger Graef’s recent
BBC documentary on The Family
covered almost exactly the same
ground but with a real family and
without dramatisation. The honest
result is perhaps more equivocal
than Family Life about some things,
but in swinging away from crit¬
icism of public institutions it courts
once more the dangers of personal¬
isation. Seeing the film afterwards,
the disturbed family were perhaps
no less a prey to its presentation
of their relationships than the
Edwards were. And for some
people there was a sense of dis¬
comfort that the pursuit of general
‘truth ’ should have to be at the
expense of such particular revela¬
tion. Mr. Rosenthal’s book is
invaluable evidence for exactly
this kind of debate.
GAVIN MILLAR
GREED: A FILM BY
ERICH VON STROHEIM
Edited by Joel W. Finler
LORRIMER PUBLISHING,
£4.95 (Cloth), £1.95 (Paper)
Of the potentially great unfinished
and bowdlerised works with which
film history is strewn, Eisenstein’s
Que Viva Mexico! and Stroheim’s
Greed are probably the saddest
cases. Eisenstein’s tragedy has been
chronicled in several works; now
Lorrimer has added to their
valuable collection of international
scripts the original version of
Greed , adapted from the script
published by the Belgian Cinema¬
theque in 1958, annotated against
the release print by Joel Finler
with a clear indication of all the cut
material, and laid out in such a way
as to bring Stroheim’s visual
methods brilliantly to life. As is
well known, Stroheim’s original
was in two parts, lasting 42 reels;
after M-G-M had protested, he
reduced it to 24 reels. Rex Ingram
then got it down to 18 reels and the
final coup de grace was adminis¬
tered by an anonymous cutter
who produced the standard release
version of 10 reels (or just over two
hours).
The main questions posed after
reading this enormous 300-page
script are: could the film have
worked at its ten-hour length, and
was it necessary ? Stroheim’s initial
decision that the only way to
preserve the power and pessimism
of Frank Norris* novel was to film
it virtually intact, suggests that he
must have been aware of the
commercial folly of the under¬
taking. Faced with an unwieldy
monstrosity, the various cutters
responded by eliminating entire
subplots and complete sequences.
Gone completely are the episodes
featuring Zerkow, the junk dealer
(Cesare Gravina), and Maria, the
charlady (Dale Fuller), whose
bizarre dreams of gold were meant
to parallel and parody the rela¬
tionship between Trina and
McTeague; the romance between
an old lady and gentleman in the
house where McTeague practised
his dentistry; most of the scenes
involving Trina’s family at home;
the entire sequence after her
murder showing McTeague’s wan¬
derings before he reaches Death
Valley; and much of the slow,
detailed transition of Trina from
the sweet, timid wife to the miserly
shrew. Most unhappy, perhaps, is
the omission of all the early
sequences showing McTeague’s
life in the mining camp and his
arrival in San Francisco, where the
leading characters were gradu¬
ally introduced. Most of these
sequences were Stroheim’s own
inventions and not based on the
novel; about fifty pages of script
are devoted to beautifully detailed
visuals (interrupted only occasion¬
ally by titles) in which one can see
how graphically Stroheim was
using the San Francisco streets,
boarding houses and family
parlours to establish his characters
in their surroundings.
Real doubts begin to occur when
one reaches the main body of the
story. Apart from obvious bits of
padding and repetition (which
Stroheim himself might have
eliminated, as he probably altered
other things as the film was being
shot), some of the symbolic
elements, notably shots of birds in
cages intercut with the human
action, appear as awkward on the
page as they do on screen. The
great insoluble question is, of
course, whether Stroheim could
actually have sustained the in¬
exorable piling up of detail over
such a wide span. Certainly, the
script is rarely boring, being full of
little bits of business—including
the kind of broad caricature of
bourgeois life which he delighted
in—together with grotesque images
of grasping hands and shining
coins seemingly designed to trans¬
cend the literal, naturalistic scope
and shape of the original.
Apart from the subplots, most of
the narrative embellishments went
as well. Thus, at the beginning of
Part Two, we have a cut scene
showing an Easter holiday on the
streets with Marcus parading on a
horse, followed soon after by an
elaborate quarrel between Trina
and McTeague ending in a marvel¬
lous set-piece showing her coveting
her money. Of 28 pages of script,
only two actually appear in the
released film. And this is the
pattern throughout, with Stroheim
consciously probing and dissecting
with the expansiveness normally
found only in the 19th century
novel.
In the event, it would probably
have been unbearable, even in the
24-reel version. And yet, as some
bizarre description flashes up from
the page, one longs to see it in
motion. . . Stroheim of course
stated that ‘the rest of the negative
was burned to get the 43 cents
worth of silver out.* Neverthe¬
less, persistent, unsubstantiated
rumours have recently emanated
from America suggesting that an
original print or negative has been
found somewhere. Or is it waiting,
damp and decaying, to be un¬
covered in some forgotten vault ?
JOHN GILLETT
THE AMERICAN FILM
INSTITUTE CATALOG OF
MOTION PICTURES
PRODUCED IN THE
UNITED STATES:
FEATURE FILMS 1921-1930
Executive Editor: Kenneth W.
Munden
R. R. BOWKER COMPANY,
NEW YORK & LONDON, $55
I feel like a man, having spent his
life trying to light fires with flint,
who is suddenly presented with a
butane lighter. For more than a
decade I have been steadily build¬
ing up a filing index of every
American silent film, listing cast
and technical credits. Information
for silent films is extraordinarily
hard to find, and unless you have
access to the film itself, you have
to spend hours poring over trade
papers, year books and fan maga¬
zines. And none of these sources
is reliable.
Now, after only three years
work, the American Film Insti¬
tute has produced a Catalogue of
Feature Films , 1921-1930. It is the
answer to a film historian’s prayer,
for it is an alphabetical list of every
American feature made during
those years, with cast, credits,
synopsis, date, length, copyright
number and the gauge it was shot
on. (Almost every film was 35mm,
but one or two titles, such as The
Big Trail , were shot on both 35mm
and 70mm.)
As if that weren’t enough, there is
a second volume, almost as heavy
as the first; an index of every
name included in the catalogue.
As a final flourish, there is a sub¬
ject index. Not simply ‘Westerns’
and ‘Thrillers’: this index covers
every subject known to man. Look
up films about fish, for instance.
The catalogue will tell you, curtly,
to look up the particular species.
Hundreds of titles are listed under
‘filial relationships’. And ‘Holly¬
wood’ steers you to some unknown
titles that will ruin the sleep of
any film collector. Rupert Hughes’
Souls for Sale , for instance, made
for Goldwyn in 1923 (I might
casually mention the New York
premiere was 27th March, its
release followed on 22nd April, and
it was copyrighted ten days earlier),
features such celebrities as Chaplin,
shown directing Woman of Paris ,
Stroheim, shown directing Greedy
and Fred Niblo, shown directing
The Famous Mrs. Fair. Other
Hollywood personalities playing
themselves: Bessie Love, Dagmar
Godowsky, Marshall Neilan, ZaSu
Pitts, Florence and King Vidor and
Chester Conklin. (The picture has
been lost for nearly fifty years,
but Eileen Bowser, of the Museum
of Modem Art, saw it in Czecho¬
slovakia recently, and is negotia¬
ting an exchange.)
The Catalogue is one of the
few absolutely indispensable works
for the serious film enthusiast. The
enormous amount of work that
has gone into it will almost certainly
lead to a plethora of get-rich-quick
film histories. The Catalogue makes
life so easy that a sociological
review of the films of the Twenties
could be dashed off between the
Late Show and the Late Late
Show. While the two volumes are
extremely expensive, the cost is
laughable in comparison with the
value.
Anyone who has published a
film history—or a history of any
sort—will be extremely sensitive
about errors and misprints. There
is hardly a printed work without
them, so it is no slur on the care¬
ful cross-checking of the cata¬
loguers to point out that both
volumes have a lot of mistakes.
No computer—let alone a human
—could possibly produce such a
massive work without a flaw. (The
computer used for this job grew
exhausted towards the end of
Volume One and planted The Blue
Mountain Mystery among the Ws
on page 899.) Sidney Franklin,
the director, is muddled up with
Sidney Franklin the actor. Ernest
Schoedsack was making Grass when
the Catalogue says he was photo¬
graphing Greed —and he gets no
credit for photographing much of
the next item, The Greek-Turkish
War in Asia Minor . Ben Carre was
the art director on The Light in
the Darky not the cameraman.
It is the responsibility of those
of us who know something about
the films of this period to list those
mistakes which can definitely be
Write for details to the:
Summer School Secretary BFI
81 Dean Street London W1V 6AA
proved, and send them in to the
American Film Institute as soon
as possible. The second edition can
then be corrected.
A vast number of credits can
never be checked. M-G-Al took
very little notice of individual con¬
tributions; they simply listed the
head of the department. If Cedric
Gibbons did the art direction on
every picture he was credited with,
he would have broken Olympic
records running from set to set.
Sometimes as many as six directors
worked on a picture, but only one
received the credit. The Cossacks
is credited to George Hill. Nils
Asther, who played the second
lead, never even saw George Hill
on the set, because the picture
was largely reshot and re-cast by
Clarence Brown. So the Catalogue
can never do more than list the
official version, although helpful
notes often indicate where doubt
exists.
In an hour’s perusal of the
Catalogue, I have learned more
valuable information than in a
year’s output of run-of-the-mill
film books. As I scatter my filing
cards to the winds, I send fervent
thanks to the team who put the
Catalogue together: Kenneth M un¬
den, executive editor, Lee Atwell,
Patricia Ann Bledsloe, Harvey
Deneroff, Harold Blanchard Green¬
wood, Barbara Humphrys, Frances
Jones and Stephen Zito. They can
be as proud of their work as some
of the more famous names listed
in their magnificent Catalogue.
KEVIN BROWNLOW
Patterns of Realism, by Roy
Armes (The Tantivy Press, £5.00).
A useful survey of Italian neo¬
realism. As well as exploring the
content of films both major and
minor, Mr. Armes has read the
surrounding literature, and he
weaves his text together with some
illuminating quotations (many of
them previously untranslated). He
relates neo-realism to the past and
the future. It originated, he
believes, in the Italian regional
theatre, Verga and the French
cinema of the Thirties (Came and
Feyder as much as Renoir). The
influence of the American novel
was marginal, he argues, yet the
influence did exist: one more link
between neo-realism and the
French revival of the late Fifties.
He throws a new light on Godard
by analysing his debt to Rossellini.
In recent years neo-realism has
lost its enchantment. The subject,
a journalists’ entity, sinks easily
into unreal semantic quibbling
about the nature of the real, a
hazard Mr. Armes does not
entirely avoid. But he does open up
lines of thought when he points out
how most of the films are rooted
in melodrama and how they have a
good deal in common with the
Italian epic movie tradition. By
making such connections he opens
up the field once more, recaptures
an old excitement about its impor¬
tance and raises some tantalising
questions. In what way, for
instance, was Zavattini’s role as a
scriptwriter different from that of
Jacques Pr^vert ? And if the neo-
realists were among the first to
create a directors’ cinema, why do
we think of Zavattini as one of its
leading lights ? Rossellini, De Sica
and Visconti have the lion’s share
of the book, understandably, but
Mr. Armes also revives interest in
the contributions of Vergano,
Lizzani, Lattuada, De Santis and
others. He demonstrates, perhaps
surprisingly, how many of these
directors were drawn to the subject
of agrarian reform and of the
South; in this sense De Sica and
Rossellini were unusual in their
choice of themes.— eric Rhode
□
Letters
‘King Kong* at the N.F.T.
sir, —The National Film Theatre
included King Kong in the recent
Great Screenwriters season, at¬
tributing it to Edgar Wallace.
I liked Edgar Wallace very much
in the short time I knew him in
Hollywood. I can only quote from
his book My Hollywood Diary, page
170, Jan. 6th, 1932* ‘The next
month or two are very important
to me. If this big film gets over
that Cooper is doing, it’s going to
make a big difference to me, for
although I am not responsible for
the success of the picture, and
really can’t be, since the ideas
were mainly Cooper’s, I shall get
all the credit for authorship and
invention which rightly belong to
him.*
Edgar Wallace died almost
exactly one month later. I used not
a single idea from him in the
motion picture King Kong , but used
his name because I had promised
to do so. If Edgar Wallace were
alive I feel sure—as he was a fair-
minded man—that he would be
the first to say that not one single
scene, nor line of dialogue, in King
Kong was contributed by him.
Yours faithfully,
MERIAN C. COOPER
Coronado, California.
Teenagers and the ‘X’
sir, —Myself and some friends
have just been to sec an ‘X’ film,
the only trouble was we were under
age. We’re not the first, for ‘kids’
have been doing it for years.
I should think the reason for the
certificate system is, or should I
116
say was, to stop young people from
being: sexually excited or per¬
verted, political agitators or violent.
There are the weak-minded, I
agree, who are attracted to what
might cause trouble. I believe that
this is caused more by bad educa¬
tion and/or a lack of interests to fill
spare time. It is a known fact that
‘Art’, if one may label some films
with this title (most are ‘X’s),
reflects the society it thrives in, and
society today is a ‘tug-of-war’
between the remaining Old Estab¬
lishment and the new young ideals.
I see no reason why the follow¬
ing system should not be intro¬
duced: ‘U’—Universal, ‘A’—for
anybody over 15, there being no
other certificate. Thus such films
as Danish Blue and Soldier Blue
could be (remembering the prudish
county censors), or would be shown
as they have been in the ‘X’ form.
Reasons for this system are as
follows:
(1) Many, not all, cinemas have
for some time had little dis¬
crimination over the age of
persons that they admit.
(2) School film clubs show at
least one ‘X* to seven of another
certificate. Age of viewers 13-18.
(3a) The age for marriage (with
parents’ consent) at 16. One is
allowed a certain amount of sex-
life but cannot go to an ‘X’. The
argument is there.
(3b) Children learn the facts of
life around the age of 9, and are
physically and mentally mature
by 15.
(4) Sex and violence, in varying
degrees, in books, plays and TV;
not to mention the world around
us.
(5) Swearing is more common¬
place. The certificate for La
Guerre des Boutons seems
ridiculous these days.
(6) At this age most children are
in public schools, or have left
school. Thus picking up
practical or theoretical know¬
ledge. The intellect of children
is higher than before, but of
course being children they still
act their age.
(7) Another interesting factor is
the content of some of the ‘X’
films released in 1971, such as
Deep End , Friends and Summer
of * 42 . They are all about the
same subject, and the point to
notice is that the main characters
are of the average age of fifteen.
Take it as you like it, the
certificate system is a show of
shallow-mindedness and is also
taken as an insult by teenagers of
the present society.
Yours faithfully,
C. C. FITCHETT
Oxshott, Surrey.
Bernard Herrmann
sir, —‘Music essentially provides
an unconscious series of anchors for
the viewer,* says Bernard Herrmann
(my italics) in ‘The Colour of the
Music’ (Winter 1971/72), and thus
comes near to contradicting some
of his comments toTedGilling and
to repudiating statements he has
made elsewhere. For example, on
BBC TV: ‘Whether the music
should be noticed. . . to be noticed
too much, it’s like being aware of
camera tricks, and not to be noticed
at all means that it’s just mundane.’
However, if Bernard Herrmann
modestly has in mind his own
genius in fusing images and sound,
it is easy to understand the sort of
persuasive achievement to which
he alludes. His lightly scored,
unemphatic ‘Memory Waltz* in
The Snows of Kilimanjaro is a
classic example of ‘making the film
go forward*. Conventional shots of
Paris are shown with Gregory
Peck’s ‘voice-over*, and Peck’s and
Ava Gardner’s stand-ins are fleet-
ingly seen in long-shot; but it is
the sensitive, delicate music that
provides the nostalgia, retrospec¬
tive wisdom and sad awareness
that ‘it had been good there*. I
suspect that Mr. Herrmann may
be in error about Kilimanjaro, since
my own memory tells me that
within the film itself, at the height
of Harry Street’s fever, there are
definite references to motifs
explored more fully in one of the
most electrifying main-titles ever
heard in the cinema.
Mr. Herrmann’s reticence about
Hitchcock is understandable: their
collaboration, as appropriate as
hot-dogs and mustard, is arguably
the finest example of a composer-
director relationship, and its
termination was sad indeed. An
interesting footnote to that col¬
laboration is Mr. Herrmann’s
own recent recordings of his
Hitchcock music. Illuminating in
many ways, they illustrate particu¬
larly well how a composer’s
thoughts can be governed or even
restricted by the demands of a film.
Timing kept Newman, who could
be an incredibly self-indulgent
conductor of his own work, up to
the mark. But Bernard Herrmann’s
latest recordings, notably of a
Mamie segment, suggest that he
may prefer more spacious and, for
some of us, more fitting tempi
than the exigencies of the medium
sometimes allow.
Yours faithfully,
LIONEL GODFREY
Leamington Spa, Warwickshire.
Top Ten
sir, —No doubt you’ll be receiving
several hundred lists like this one.
None the less—herewith my list of
The Ten Films Most Unfairly
Neglected By Critics Choosing
Their Top Ten Films in 1972:
Yojimbo , Le Jour se L&ve, The Big
Sleep , La Ronde (Ophuls), The
Bank Dick , Metropolis , Freaks , The
Pawnbroker , Alexander Nevsky ,
Strangers on a Train.
I’m also tempted to compile a
list of The Ten Most Overrated
Monumentally Boring Films of All
Time, headed by The Passion of
Joan of Arc and Mother. . . but
why cause trouble ?
Yours faithfully,
PHILIP KEMP
London, S.W.3.
Traffic
sir, —I somewhat resent Mr.
Andrews’ opinion in his review of
Traffic (Winter issue) that
Tantivy Film Publications
The Cinema of John Ford
by John Baxter. A lucid and compelling analysis of the legendary director whose work is far more complex and
contradictory than it would first appear. John Baxter analyses and discusses Ford's entire output from Cameo
Kirby through Stagecoach and The Grapes of Wrath up to Donovan s Reef.
176 pages and 65 stills 90p
Patterns of Realism
by Roy Armes. A major study of Italian Neo-Realist cinema which produced such giants as Visconti, De Sica
and Rossellini, and was to influence some of Europe's greatest modern directors—Fellini, Godard, Pasolini, etc.
This should prove to be the standard work on its subject.
Large format. 226 pages. 239 stills, dustwrapper £5
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Covers all the Bond films including Diamonds are Forever.
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directors have also contributed—Joseph Losey, Tony Richardson, John Schlesinger, etc.
176 pages, over 100 stills and diagrams May 5th £1.25
now available: Concise History of the Cinema 1 and 2, £1.25 each. France £1.25. Hollywood in the Fifties 90p.
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Accredited by the CACC Member of the ABCC
Inside every film review there's
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trying to get out. . . .
Most of it gets into the
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credits of every feature film
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i
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The first index ever published to the work
of jazz musicians for the Cinema.
Illustrated 50p/$2.00
FILMS 0\ OFFER
compiled by David Meeker
A complete booking guide to over 2000
features and 1000 shorts currently on offer
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1972 edition available May 50p/$2.00
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FOCUS ON FILM
the magazine of film research
starts its third year with issue no. 9 containing a full report
on the career of CLINT EASTWOOD, including numerous
illustrations and details of his entire film output from Revenge
of the Creature to the unreleased Joe Kidd; an interview with
SUSANNAH YORK; a tribute to the delightful character
actor CHARLIE RUGGLES with full coverage of his fifty
years in film; and a study of DOROTHY COMINGORE,
best remembered as the second wife of Charles Foster Kane.
Plus reappraisal of S|6strom’s Under the Red Robe, reviews of new
films Kotch, McCabe and Mrs Miller , Voice of the Water, with
career details for their principal artists, and other usual features.
68 pages. Price 30p or $1.25.
By post (35p/$l.25) from The Tantivy Press, 108 New Bond
Street, London WIY 0QX.
‘Haanstra’s comic vision is es¬
sentially malicious, the art of
catching human beings off their
guard at an instinctive behaviour-
istic low. . .*
After a successful showing of
Haanstra’s The Human Dutch at
the Edinburgh Festival, I was told
by a British critic that in his
opinion ‘Haanstra never laughs at
people, but with people,’ a much
better judgment, I think, than the
one expressed by Mr. Andrews. In
all his films (except, maybe, a
short sequence in Zoo), Haanstra
allows his persons all their dignity.
He does not film ‘behaviouristic
lows* but observes and films
minor and very human occur¬
rences, often mini-dramas that
can be observed by everyone but
are not.
Yours faithfully,
G. J. VAN DER MOLEN
The Hague, Holland.
The Marx Brothers
sir, —I am preparing a thesis on the
Marx Brothers at the Royal College
of Art, taking in their whole career
from vaudeville through Broadway
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
judy adamson taught English
Literature at Loyola College in
Montreal and is at present at
the University of Montreal, finish¬
ing a doctoral thesis on Graham
Greene’s film work in its various
aspects... John lindsay brown is
Assistant Director of the Scottish
Film Council in Glasgow... james
Paul gay is an American film¬
maker and critic at present working
in Stockholm. . . Neville hun-
nings, author of the book Film
Censors and the Law , is Senior
Research Officer at the British
Institute of International and
Comparative Law and the editor
of Common Market Law Reports ...
mari kuttna is a journalist and
film critic who revisits Hungary
regularly. At present, she is
working on a book about
Hungarian animation. . . Bernard
weiner was editor of Northwest
Passage in the Pacific Northwest,
has contributed to Film Quarterly,
and is film critic of the San
Francisco Fault.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Columbia-Warner for The Last
Picture Show , Macbeth , Dirty
Harry, Klute, Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?, What's Up, Doc ?.
mgm-emi for The Boy Friend.
20th century-fox for Un Soir
— un Train.
united artists for The Graduate .
UNITED ARTISTS/BLACK INK FILMS
for Modem Times.
avco EMBASSY for Carnal
Knowledge.
RKO-RADIO PICTURES/NATIONAL
FILM ARCHIVE for Citizen Kane.
THE OTHER cinema for Punishment
Park.
LIONS GATE FILMS/HEMDALB for
Images.
COLUMBIA pictures for The
Widower.
HAWK FILMS/COLUMBIA-WARNER
for A Clockwork Orange .
to Hollywood, and I am anxious to
locate any original scripts of their
films that may be perused or photo¬
copied. It’s proving difficult too to
set down clearly their stage work,
both in the States and in England:
theatre programmes and good
memories would perhaps help here.
Can any of your readers help me
in this ? I would be most grateful.
Yours faithfully,
GEOFFREY BROWN
22 Evelyn Gardens,
London, S.W.7.
Our Village Film
We have been asked by the
Principal of Colchester Technical
College and School of Art to make
clear that none of the College’s
students took part in filming an
orgy at Layer Mamey for Pasolini’s
I Racconti di Canterbury (sight and
sound. Winter 1971/72). David
Robinson points out that there was
possibly not even an orgy: he only
reported the talk among the
optimistic extras taking part in
the Coggeshall filming.
PARC film for Rendez-vous d.
Bray.
marceau-cocinor (Paris)/
p.e.a. (Rome) for Histoires
Extraordinaires.
RAI-RADIOTELEVISIONE italiana/
ortf/bavaria film/leone for
The Clowns.
nbc-tv for A Director's Notebook.
NATIONAL FILM BOARD OF CANADA
for photograph of John Grierson.
hungarofilm for Sindbad ,
photograph of Kdroly Makk.
anti-theater, (Munich) for
The American Soldier, Gods of
the Plague, Katzelmacher.
SVENSK FILMINDUSTRI for The
Emigrants.
SWEDISH FILM INSTITUTE/BO-ERIK
gyberg for Whisperings and Cries.
w. hirsch for 48 Cook Street.
BERNARD HERRMANN for photo¬
graph of Orson Welles and
Bernard Herrmann.
NATIONAL FILM ARCHIVE for
Man of Aran, The Jazz Comedy.
NATIONAL FILM THEATRE/RICHARD
lyon for photograph of Graham
Greene.
CORRESPONDENTS
HOLLYWOOD : Axel Madsen
Italy : Giulio Cesare Castello
France : Gilles Jacob, Rui Nogueira
Australia: Charles Higham
Scandinavia: lb Monty
Spain : Francisco Aranda
POLAND : Boleslaw Michalek
India: Amita Malik
printed by The Whitefriars Press
Ltd., London and Tonbridge,
England.
blocks by Art Reprographic
(London) Ltd.
sole agents for U.S.A.: Eastern
News Distributors, 155 West 15th
Street, New York 10011.
ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION RATES
(4 issues) £1.40 including postage.
U.S.A. : 85. Price per copy in United
States, $1.25.
publication dates: i st January,
1st April, 1st July, and 1st
October.
Overseas Editions: 12th of these
months.
Il8
■K Ike Professional
niMIO 16 mm MOJICTORS
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Universities, Cinemas,
Polytechnics, Industry, B.B.C. etc,
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films
PLAYBOY IN A MONASTERY InUnrlew with John Boorman □ THE WESTERN ►
PUBLIC MADNESS AND PRIVATE LUNACY □ SHOOT OUT IN DEAN STREET
PICTURE PREVIEWS: MACBETH □ DELIVERANCE Q A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
GOING HOME □ TCHAIKOVSKY Q THX-113B 0 ONCE AND TOR ALWAYS
february 1972 35p
and
filming
films and filming
can be obtained all over the
world through retailers,
subscription agents or direct
from the publishers (£4.65, US $11.20
for 12 monthly issues) Hansom Books
75 Artillery Mansions, London, SWI
•ADVENTURES OF C.OOPY
AND BAGHA, THE
( Contemporary )
Satyajit Ray’s excursion into
legend and fairy-tale suffers from
over-stressed playing and feeble
special effects, yet has many
moments of charm and satire
when the wizards and spells take
over. Witty decor, and music by
the director. (Tapan Chatterjee,
Santosh Dutta.)
♦♦BOOKSELLER WHO GAVE
UP BATHING, THE
{Peter Darvill Associates)
Enchanting and funny first film
by Jarl Kulle about an ageing
bachelor’s Indian summer of
romance and the rude collapse of
his Eden when his beloved turns
out to be a whore. Reminiscent of
Menzel’s Capricious Summer in
its tone of nostalgic melancholy.
(Allan Edwall, Margareta Krook,
Jarl Kulle.)
•♦BOUCHER, LE ( Connoisseur)
Chabrol’s splendid study of a
murder case in a French
provincial landscape, and the
relationship between the lonely
butcher and the schoolmistress.
Hitchcockian, of course; but by
now it’s more than enough to say
Chabrolian. (Jean Yanne,
St£phane Audran.)
BOY FRIEND, THE
(MGM-EMI)
Ken Russell’s latest, in which a
seaside company’s ruthlessly
guyed production of Sandy
Wilsoms show is made the
launching pad for pastiche Busby
Berkeley extravaganza. An
appealingly straight and simple
performance by Twiggy, whjle
styles collide all around her.
(Max Adrian, Christopher Gable.)
Reviewed.
COWBOYS, THE
( Columbia- Warner)
Big John Wayne in charge of
eleven small boys on a junior
cattle drive. All is sweetness and
light and boy scout homily until
Bruce Dem’s hippie rustler turns
nasty, saddle leather runs with
blood, and True Grit boy’s paper
adventure jolts into a
miscalculated Lord of the Flies
in Colorado. (Roscoe Lee Browne;
director, Mark Rydell.)
♦♦DECAMERON, THE
{United Artists)
Pasolini’s entertaining version of
Boccaccio’s Neapolitan talcs,
linked by himself as Giotto. In
his ow*n w'ords ‘earthy, frolicsome,
crowded with people and full of
light’, and like a medieval
canvas in its colourful delineation
of the social pecking order.
(Franco Citti, Ninctto Davoli,
Angela Luce.) Reviewed.
♦♦DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER
{United Artists )
Timely return to form by 007,
still in pursuit of the indomitable
Blofeld, who this time is
machinating in duplicate from the
top of a Las Vegas skyscraper.
Active, expensive, more absurd
than ever and just about the
best Bond since Goldfinger.
(Sean Connery, Jill St. John;
director, Guy Hamilton.)
♦DYNAMITE MAN FROM
GLORY JAIL
( Columbia - Warner)
Adaptation of a Davis Grubb
novel, in which James Stewart
plays an aged ex-convict trying to
cash a cheque for his prison
earnings, and hunted by a madly
vengeful jail guard. Misses all
the stylised obsession of Night
of the Hunter , but it has its
moments. (George Kennedy,
Anne Baxter; director, Andrew
V. McLaglen.)
EMBASSY ( Hemdale)
Erratically paced, poorly scripted
thick-ear stuff about the
repercussions of a Russian
diplomat’s request for political
asylum in an American embassy.
When it moves, it moves, thanks
to stylish action direction by
Gordon Hessler; otherwise there’s
only a scene-stealing performance
from Broderick Cravword.
(Max von Sydow', Richard
Roundtree, Chuck Connors.)
♦FRENCH CONNECTION, THE
{Fox)
Deglamorised view of New' York
police in action against incoming
drug traffic. Virtuoso location
shooting (especially in big chase
scene) and coldly malevolent
portrait of cop by Gene Hackman;
but despite the modern trimmings
it is basically imitation Hathaway
of the Forties. (Roy Schneider,
Fernando Rey; director,
William Friedkin.)
GANG THAT COULDN’T
SHOOT STRAIGHT, THE
{MGM-EMI)
Lots of ideas, visual and verbal,
in this crazy-black-romantic
comedy about a takeover bid in
New York’s Italian underworld
as incompetent young hoods try
to oust the impotent old Mafia.
Unfortunately, with a director
who rarely shoots straight and
never times right, most of the
gags misfire. (Jerry Orbach,
Leigh Taylor-Young, Jo Van
Fleet; director, James Goldstone.)
•GOIN’ DOWN THE ROAD
{Contemporary )
Gloomy Canadian film, cin&ma-
viriti in style, about two not so
young small towm drifters whose
dream of the big time in the big
city is soured by the yawning
gap between making it and
making ends meet. Occasionally
illuminating in its ironic glances
at large hopes and small realities,
but mostly predictable. (Doug
McGrath, Paul Bradley;
director, Donald Shebib.)
♦HOSPITAL, THE ( United Artists)
Alternating black comedy with
philosophical schmaltz, Paddy
Chayefsky’s garrulous script uses
some hilarious blunders in a
streamlined medical establishment
as a heavy parable for modern
inadequacies. Arthur Hiller’s
direction plods, and the players
have to switch gears with the script.
(George C. Scott, Diana Rigg.)
♦♦KOTCH ( Cinerama )
Jack Lemmon’s directorial debut
stars magnificent Walter Matthau
as garrulous old grandfather who
befriends pregnant baby-sitter.
Despite sentimental family drama
cliches, Lemmon’s plain yet
feeling direction and Matthau’s
wittily detailed playing make it
an enjoyable experience.
(Deborah Winters, Felicia Farr.)
Reviewed.
♦♦LADY FROM
CONSTANTINOPLE, THE
(A cademy I Connoisseur)
Beautifully observed, quiet-toned
portrait of a sprightly old lady
changing flats in an over-crowded
Budapest. Effectively low key
direction, and a splendid
performance by Manyi Kiss,
cherishing nostalgia for a
romantic, leisurely past as she
happily adapts to an age with no
time for memories. (Director,
Judit Elek.)
••LAST PICTURE SHOW,
THE {Columbia-Warncr)
Peter Bogdanovich blends the
fading hopes of his teenage
characters and the receding
memories of their parents with
his own unintrusive nostalgia in a
brilliant evocation of Fifties life
in a declining Texas town.
Elegiacallv photographed in black
and white by Robert Surtees, and
impeccably acted. (Ben Johnson,
Timothy Bottoms, Cloris
Leachman.) Reviewed.
LOVE MACHINE, THE
( Columbia- Warner)
Monumentally ludicrous screen
version of Jacqueline Susann’s
best-selling expose of sex games
and boardroom politics in a
national television network. The
script is littered with inanities,
but not everyone seems to have
noticed. (John Phillip Law, Dyan
Cannon, Robert Ryan; director,
Jack Haley, Jr.)
♦•MACBETH {Columbia-Warner)
The Polanski version, with text
intelligently cut by Kenneth
Tynan. Stray new ideas (including
a turncoat Ross) arc interesting,
and visually the film veers between
the mainly magnificent (Macbeth’s
castle; the witches on the beach)
and the occasionally silly (the
levitating dagger). Verbally, it
plods somewhat. (Jon Finch,
Francesca Annis, Martin Shaw.)
Reviewed.
♦•MODERN TIMES
{Black Ink Films)
First London showing for almost
twenty years of Chaplin’s 1936
classic, now looking more timeless
than ever. Charlie remains ‘the
best damn ballet-dancer of them
all’, inhabiting a curiously lonely
world. (Paulette Goddard.)
Reviewed.
NIGHTCOMERS, THE
(A vc o-Embassy)
Michael Winner’s misguided
attempt to provide a prologue
to The Turn of the Screw. Much
artful suggestion in the shadows,
but little conviction despite two
alarmingly precocious innocents
and an eye-rolling Irish Quint
from Marlon Brando. (Stephanie
Beacham, Thora Hird.)
♦♦PLAY MISTY FOR ME {Rank)
A pleasantly Forties-style thriller
about a disc jockey (Clint
Eastwood), a mysterious caller
(Jessica Walter) who badgers him
to play her favourite tune, and
the nightmare of jealous
possessivencss that follow's their
first encounter. Engagingly
unassuming debut as director for
Clint Eastwood. (Donna Mills,
Don Siegel.)
PLAZA SUITE ( Paramount)
Depressingly faithful adaptation
of Neil Simon’s comic trilogy.
Not even the irreproachable
Walter Matthau, in three roles
and as many coloured rinses,
can lift it out of its stagebound
rut. (Maureen Stapleton, Lee
Grant; director, Arthur Hiller.)
•♦PUNISHMENT PARK
{Other Cinema)
Another strident Peter Watkins
allegory for the here and now,
set in tomorrow’s America w'here
dissent is rewarded with prison
or a futile desert assault course.
The voice is loud and urgent,
though doubts persist about the
general credibility. (Jim Bohan,
Stan Armsted, Gladys Golden.)
Reviewed.
♦♦ROLLER DERBY
{Cinerama)
Fascinating documentary about a
symbolically brutal American
sport. Robert Kaylor vividly
outlines the bleak prospects of
America’s Midwest as he follows
an aspiring skater from tract
home to factory bench to roller
rink.
SUCH GOOD FRIENDS
{Paramount)
Bizarre Preminger film which
glows with significance but seems
to have forgotten to enclose the
message. Vaguely barbed satirical
jabs at intellectual pretension,
social vapidity, medical
incompetence and sexual hypocrisy
nestle uncomfortably round the
hospital bed of a healthy man who
is gradually killed by his doctors
while his wife discovers that he
was anything but a devoted
husband. (Dyan Cannon, James
Coco.)
♦♦TERRA EM TRANSE
{Other Cinema)
Glauber Rocha’s third film, banned
in its own country until
international protest got it
screened. A searing critique of
the corruption of the pow'er elite
and exploitation of the masses,
with several hundred years of
Brazilian politics compressed into
a hundred minutes of burning
rage. (Jos£ Lewgoy, Jardel Filho.)
♦♦THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS
{Rank)
George C. Scott as lawyer who thinks
he’s Sherlock Holmes, tracking his
Moriarty through New York with
Joanne Woodward’s psychiatrist
Watson. A most engaging oddity,
perceptive and beautifully played,
though in this version also cruelly
cut. (Director, Anthony Haney.)
TROJAN WOMEN, THE
( Cinerama)
Another Cacoyannis version of
Euripides, and another awkward
hybnd of film and theatre with
the camera alternately static and
busily interpreting. Katharine
Hepburn nobly rises to the
occasion, but only Irene Papas’
Helen survives the piecemeal
style. (Vanessa Redgrave,
Genevieve Bujold.)
♦UNDER MILK WOOD {Rank)
Brave but unsuccessful version
of Dylan Thomas’ play for
voices (and there’s the rub), in
which a literal image-for-w'ord
approach mostly defeats
imagination. Some of the poetry
survives, but little of the spirit.
(Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole,
Sian Phillips; director, Andrew'
Sinclair.)
♦♦WEEKEND OF A
CHAMPION ( MGM-EMI)
Behind the scenes at the Monte
Carlo Grand Prix, with
Roman Polanski shadow'ing
world champion Jackie Stewart
through hopes, frustrations and
final triumph. Some intriguing
close-up glimpses of the racing
circus on and off the track.
(Director, Frank Simon.)
WHOEVER SLEW AUNTIE
ROO ? ( MGM-EMI)
Playfully updated Hansel and
Gretcl tale, with Shelley Winters
in florid cry as the widow who
keeps her dead daughter,
Psycho-style, in the nursery'. But
mostly a tame let-down after
What's the Matter with Helen ?.
(Ralph Richardson, Mark Lester;
director, Curtis Harrington.)
WHO IS HARRY
KELLERMAN AND WHY IS
HE SAYING THOSE
TERRIBLE THINGS ABOUT
ME ? {Fox)
Dustin Hoffman as a pop
composer shunted between nutty
psycniatrist and ubiquitous
alter ego. An untidy mess of
frantic farce and would-be
significant comment on the
yawning void behind the facade
of a modem success story.
(Jack Warden, Barbara Harris;
director, Ulu Grosbard.)
ZEE AND CO
{Columbia- Warner)
Poor man’s Sunday, Bloody
Sunday with Michael Caine
trapped between the perverse
sexual drives of tigerish wife
(Elizabeth Taylor, busily
carpet-chewing) and soulful
mistress (Susannah York,
dispensing soul). The first ten
quite w f itty minutes exhaust the
script, leaving the rest high,
dry and banal. (Margaret
Leighton, John Standing;
director, Brian G. Hutton.)
120
THE ONE ESSENTIAL
FILM BOOK FOR 1972
A reconstruction
in book form of
ERICH VON STROHEIM'S
GREED
Compiled and Annotated,
with a Foreword by
HERMAN G. WEINBERG
This beautifully designed and handsomely bound book
is a reconstruction of the film in 348 still photos
following the original screenplay —plus 52 production
stills — most never previously published.
The Foreword and Epilogue treat the production of
GREED, the story of its mutilation, its influence on
subsequent filmmaking, and the importance of
Erich von Stroheim as a director.
383 halftones • 9 5 /a" x 10" • 392 pages • $50.00
The Clothbound Edition of GREED is available now only
from Arno Press — send for your copy today.
ARNO PRESS
New York Times Company
330 Madison Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10017
Overseas Representative
FEFFER AND SIMONS,
31 Union Square
New York, N.Y. 10003
INC.
■1
THE ACADEMY CINEMAS
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Claude Chabrol’s THE BUTCHER
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